Cataloging and Metadata Commons^™

More Than A Name: Reparative Description For Women’S Archives, Allison Mccormack, Hallie Oines

Journal of Western Archives

This article describes a reparative description initiative at an academic library aimed at improving access to women’s archival collections. By hiring a metadata specialist through grant funding, the project revised legacy MARC records to update, expand, and standardize collection descriptions. Prioritizing inclusive language and accurate subject headings, the team addressed gaps that previously hindered discovery of women’s materials. Over two years, 818 records were remediated, enhancing creator, topical, and genre/form access points. The article discusses project challenges, strategies for respectful description, and the resulting improved discoverability, offering a replicable model for reparative archival work.

Ai And Cataloging: What Do We Know, 4 Years In?, Emily Baldoni, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This poster will disentangle AI hype from AI reality by providing a systematic review and meta-analysis of the current empirical research on AI applications for cataloging. Since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, AI has been proposed as a tool for increasing efficiency and freeing up librarians' time across all areas of librarianship, especially in the area of cataloging and metadata. There is often a gap, however, between current AI realities and the requirements of highly structured library metadata. Surveys show that many catalogers are already using Large Language Model (LLM) tools, with human intervention, to assist in tasks …

The Item Response Warehouse: What It Is, How To Use It, And Targets For Potential Improvements, Savira D. Nadela, Hansol Lee, Nishka Jain, Ayaan Gupta, Xingyi Zhang, Benjamin W. Domingue

Chinese/English Journal of Educational Measurement and Evaluation | 教育测量与评估双语期刊

The Item Response Warehouse (IRW) is a repository of harmonized item response datasets designed to support secondary analysis and methodological research in psychological and educational measurement. This paper serves as a practical guide for researchers interested in using the IRW. We describe the structure of IRW datasets and the quantitative and qualitative metadata available for dataset selection, and we demonstrate how researchers can navigate the IRW website to explore and compare available tables. We further show how the IRW R and Python packages can be used to filter datasets programmatically, download response-level data, and generate standardized citations for reproducible research …

A Digitized History Of Undergraduate Student Government At The University Of Akron, Samuel Stillion

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The digitization process of a representative sample of the physical records of the University of Akron's Undergraduate Student Government held in the University Archives and Special Collections, including notes for future archive projects with the larger records of Undergraduate Student Government

Generative Ai For Born-Digital Collections: A Case Study For Metadata Management In An Institutional Repository, Tang (Cindy) Tian

Journal Articles

This case study examines the application of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools, specifically ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-5, and Google Gemini 2.5 Flash, to streamline metadata extraction and creation for a born-digital collection within a digital repository environment. Testing four descriptive metadata elements—titles, abstracts, keywords, and full-text URLs—the study shows that AI improves efficiency in structured tasks but remains limited in semantic ones such as keyword matching. Results demonstrate that AI can streamline metadata workflows for small or resource-constrained institutions while emphasizing the continuing importance of human oversight and ethical responsibility in AI-assisted metadata workflows.

Accuracy Matters: Evaluating The Value Of Ai Tools For Summaries In Metadata, Emily Baldoni, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Since the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022, the potential impact of Artificial Intelligence on library workflows has been a topic of immense interest—and sometimes anxiety—in the library profession. In the area of cataloging and metadata, one frequently cited potential use for AI (particularly Large Language Models (LLMs)) is constructing summaries and abstracts of information resources. However, very little systematic assessment has been done of the characteristics, quality, and utility of AI-generated abstracts for library materials, leaving information professionals with little evidence on which to make data-driven decisions as to how, if at all, to implement AI-assisted workflows for this aspect …

Metadata Wrangling At Scale: One Librarian's Quest To Tame Our Electronic Theses Collection, Zeineb Yousif

Librarian Posters and Presentations

What does eight years, partnerships with your ILL and Cataloging departments, and several student workers get you? Amazing progress on your quest to digitize 140 years worth of theses and dissertations completed at your university! But also...real quality control struggles. This presentation will share lessons learned from a large scale retrospective digitization project including how to coordinate across departments and staffing changes, avoid duplicating effort, and use digital tools like Excel and OpenRefine to identify and correct metadata errors after the fact.

Fostering Belonging Through Library Descriptions, Nicole Lewis, Sharolyn Swenson, Katie Yeo, Karen Glenn

Faculty Publications

In late 2023, the BYU Library adopted its Inclusive Metadata Policy as part of its commitment to fostering a campus culture of belonging. This policy reflects the Statement on Belonging, which affirms that we “value and embrace the variety of individual characteristics, life experiences and circumstances, perspectives, talents, and gifts of each member of the community and the richness and strength they bring to our community.”[1] Catalogers and archival processors at the library are engaging in practices of cultural humility to ensure that the language and frameworks we use to describe people, communities, and histories are inclusive and respectful. …

The Invisible Default: Examining Representation In Digital Collections, Kaylee P. Alexander, Dorothy Terry, Jasmine Kirby, Rachel Jane Wittmann, Anna Neatrour

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

This mixed-method study investigates the representation of race and ethnicity within the J. Willard Marriott Digital Library at the University of Utah. The digital collections analyzed in this study come from the Marriott Library’s Special Collections, which represent only a fraction of the library’s physical material (less than 1 percent), albeit those most public facing. Using a team-based approach with librarians from various disciplines and areas of expertise, this project yielded dynamic analysis and conversation combined with heavy contemplation. These investigations are informed by contemporary efforts in librarianship focused on inclusive cataloging, reparative metadata, and addressing archival silences. By employing …

Standards And Best Practices For Assigning Subject Headings To Moving Images, Scott Dutkiewicz, Tomeka Jackson, Jen M. Jones

Presentations

This presentation discusses principles from assigning subject headings to moving images using case studies. Our focus is on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH).

Student Perspectives On Increasing Visibility Of Las Vegas African American History, Ericka Marielle Garces, Nicole Garcia-Contreras, Alfredo Lim

Communication Studies Student Research

Photographer Clinton Wright documented the everyday lives and experiences of the African American community in Las Vegas' Historic Westside from 1964 to 1971. He later donated his collection of photographic negatives to the Special Collections and Archives at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries. Although the collection is open to the public, physical access is limited to the Special Collections Reading Room, which may restrict usability for some researchers and community members. This project highlights the importance of digitization and metadata workflows in improving access to and visibility of archival materials.

In this poster, the authors present their work …

Pulling Up Stakes: Migrating Digital Collections From Contentdm To Digital Commons, Adam C. Northam

Velma K. Waters Library Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Making De-Prioritized Gifts/Donations/Inventory Discoverable For Researchers, Alie Visser, Christina Zoricic

Western Libraries Presentations

This poster discusses a project to oversee the quality control and brief description of over 21,000 rare and unique items donated to the library in an unprocessed “backlog” spanning decades. The goals of this project include making the material discoverable and requestable by researchers, establishing labour benchmarks for material processing, and assigning an appropriate receiving library to items for inventory control in preparation for the cataloguing unit’s move to a new physical location.

Following a system migration from Sierra to Alma, the library was left with over 21,000 unprocessed items that were not represented in the library’s discovery system. Lacking …

How Granular Do You Want To Go? Analyizing Marcxml Data With Python, Rebecca Hyams

Publications and Research

While Alma Analytics can be quite powerful, it has its limits when it comes to providing answers to complex questions about bibliographic and holdings records. For those of us that do work that includes maintaining and enhancing records, having good quality data is vital in making informed decisions on the best way forward. You may find you want to know things like which additional identifiers are present in the record to help with deduplication efforts, or how many records have a particular formatting issue that needs addressing. The data is already there in the record and can be accessed via …

How To Train Your Digital Commons, Savanna Nolan, Wendy Moore

Presentations

Creating and managing institutional repositories using tools like Digital Commons can seem large and intimidating at first, but you too can train these monsters to do your bidding! The UGA Law Library will discuss three strategies we've used to be more efficient, create new workflows, and increase public discoverability by partnering with state and national digital libraries. We will focus on the ingestion of law school journals, digitization of historical photographs, recordings, and treatises, and the metadata to facilitate wider access.

Linked Data, Wikidata And Their Implementations, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

An introductory session on linked data, wikidata and related implementations delivered to participating students for a National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Major Collaborative Archives Initiative Grant led by Dr. Rosalind J. Beiler in History and Dr. Amy Giroux in Center for Humanities and Digital Research at the University of Central Florida.

Hashes Are Not Suitable To Verify Fixity Of The Public Archived Web, Mohamed Aturban, Martin Klein, Herbert Van De Sompel, Sawood Alam, Michael L. Nelson, Michele C. Weigle

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Web archives, such as the Internet Archive, preserve the web and allow access to prior states of web pages. We implicitly trust their versions of archived pages, but as their role moves from preserving curios of the past to facilitating present day adjudication, we are concerned with verifying the fixity of archived web pages, or mementos, to ensure they have always remained unaltered. A widely used technique in digital preservation to verify the fixity of an archived resource is to periodically compute a cryptographic hash value on a resource and then compare it with a previous hash value. If the …

Digital Bookplates: Cataloging Processes And Workflows, Alie Visser

Western Libraries Publications

Historically, bookplates were found in the front of print monographs. Transitioning them to digital allows libraries to expand their visibility to researchers and to fundraising activities within institutions. Digital bookplates offer significant opportunities to honor or memorialize individuals with gifts to libraries at varying donation levels. This article discusses digital bookplates in an academic library and provides examples of the cataloging, metadata, and web processes involved in maintaining and collaborating on this active fundraising program. A previous article on this topic was published in 2012 and this article provides an update to its procedures and workflows a decade later.

Metadata Best Practices For Trans And Gender Diverse Resources, Trans Metadata Collective, Jasmine Burns, Michelle Cronquist, Jackson Huang, Devon Murphy, K. J. Rawson, Beck Schaefer, Jamie Simons, Brian M. Watson, Adrian Williams

Librarian Publications & Presentations

This document is the result of a year of work and collaboration by the Trans Metadata Collective (TMDC; https://transmetadatacollective.org/), a group of dozens of cataloguers, librarians, archivists, scholars, and information professionals with a concerted interest in improving the description and classification of trans and gender diverse people in GLAMS (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Special Collections). The Collective’s primary goal was to develop a set of best practices for the description, cataloguing, and classification of information resources as well as the creation of metadata about trans and gender diverse people, including authors and other creators.

Creating Knowledge Graphs For Collections And Lod Visualization: Some Cases, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This presentation will share knowledge graphs and other Linked Open Data (LOD) visualization the author created or helped in creating for a few projects, including people in the Pemberton Correspondence Collection, WikiProject: Chinese Female Poets, and UCF Teachers & Researchers. It will also cover the current state of LOD in Ex Libris’ library services platform Alma. The purpose of this talk is to help our cataloging folks better understand LOD and be better prepared for the upcoming changes related to LOD in our library system.

Law Library Blog (October 2021): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

Crowdsourcing Metadata: The Revolutionary Cataloging Interface And How It Can Help Your Library Expose And Promote Hidden Collections, Samuel T. Barber

Digital Initiatives Symposium

The crowdsourcing of metadata to expose and promote hidden collections is a significant and growing development in libraries, archives and museums, and offers hitherto unparalleled mass-collaborative potential for digital humanities projects. Originating from the field of citizen science, the online Zooniverse platform has been successfully utilized for this purpose by institutions including the Imperial War Museum, the Folger and the Huntington. This session presents recently published original research¹ in order to analyze and explain the automated quality control features of this major metadata crowdsourcing digital platform. The results, it is argued, are truly revolutionary. We conclude with a brief …

Spark A Conversation On Metadata Inclusiveness, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This session introduces the context for metadata inclusiveness and presents some of the efforts the speaker has been involved with, including helped create the Inclusive Metadata & Conscious Editing Resources List as a member of the Sunshine State Digital Network (SSDN) Metadata Working Group, and organized “Embracing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) in Library Cataloging” for the ALA Core Interest Group Week in Spring 2021. It focuses on describing cases, examples and other resources from the SSDN Resources List, so as to give librarians and staff members in Technical Services at the University Central Florida Libraries a better understanding and …

Modeling Black Literature: Behind The Screen With The Black Bibliography Project, Brenna Bychowski, Melissa Barton

Library Staff Publications

The Black Bibliography Project (BBP) plans to produce a bibliographic database of printed works by Black writers from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries. With the support of the Beinecke Library and a grant from the Mellon Foundation, project co-PIs and codirectors Jacqueline Goldsby and Meredith McGill collaborated with a team of librarians from Yale to develop the data model for their database. Drawing on Beinecke’s James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection to pull case studies, the team of librarians developed a Linked Data model for BBP in an instance of Wikibase and trained and supported a group of graduate student …

Cataloging Manuscripts And Archival Collections, Rebecca A. Wiederhold

Faculty Publications

Catalogers are increasingly responsible for creating metadata for a variety of unusual items. In the Beyond Books: Cataloging Special Format Items preconference at ULA 2019, participants learned how to catalog manuscripts/archival collections, artists’ books, zines, and posters. This webinar will reprise the Manuscripts and Archival Collections segment of that session, educating participants on when it’s appropriate to catalog special collections material archivally as a collection versus on an item level. Whether you have finding aids to use as a base for your catalog record or you are working directly with the materials, guidelines for using DACS and RDA for manuscript …

Big Data: Managing Large Scale Metadata Projects In A Teleworked Environment, Rachel S. Evans, Mary Miller, Kathleen Carter, Kelley Ansley

Presentations

Beginning in March of 2020, Mary Miller and Kathleen Carter coordinated the work of over 100 University of Georgia Libraries students, faculty, and staff on remote metadata projects for the Brown Media Archives. The great majority of these UGA employees were not catalogers, were not familiar with metadata concepts, and had never visited the Brown Media Archives. Yet, in a four-month period, they successfully completed a quantity of work that would have taken Brown Media two and a half years to accomplish at regular staffing levels. Miller and Carter will share what they got right, what they got wrong and …

Rethinking Record Groups And University Archives Classification At The University Of Nevada, Las Vegas, Tammi Kim

Library Faculty Research

This case study describes a multi-year project to reclassify the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ (UNLV) University Archives. UNLV’s Special Collections and Archives decided to rethink and reorganize University Archives based on data collected during an archival collections survey. The steps included moving away from the existing record series classification and implementing a new collection classification schema that will improve discovery and access. This study outlines steps taken during the survey and describes how staff analyzed existing collection records and metadata in order to create more cohesive intellectual control of archival materials across the Special Collections and Archives Division. This …

Conference Roundup: Smart Cataloging - Beginning The Move From Batch Processing To Automated Classification, Rachel S. Evans

Articles, Chapters and Online Publications

This article reviewed the Amigos Online Conference titled “Work Smarter, Not Harder: Innovating Technical Services Workflows” keynote session delivered by Dr. Terry Reese on February 13, 2020. Excerpt:

"As the developer of MarcEdit, a popular metadata suite used widely across the library community, Reese’s current work is focused on the ways in which libraries might leverage semantic web techniques in order to transform legacy library metadata into something new. So many sessions related to using new technologies in libraries or academia, although exciting, are not practical enough to put into everyday use by most librarians. Reese’s keynote, titled Smart Cataloging: …

Establishing Best Practices In Institutional Repository Organization, Scott Bacon

Digital Commons Southeastern User Group Meeting (2020) (Archived)

On the one-year anniversary of the CCU Digital Commons repository the organization of the Collections / Communities.html page was reviewed to gauge the need for revisions. Over 100 Digital Commons sites were examined to see how other repository managers organized their Collections pages. Top-level communities were coded into Community Types and were analyzed to surface trends in current practice. This presentation reviews trends in practice that emerged during research, as well as some of the best practices that were identified, including planning, iteration, labeling, limiting jargon, and finding a balance with top-level and nested content. Suggestions for improvement are given …

Linked Data For The Real World: Leveraging Metadata For Cataloging, Rachel S. Evans, Robin Fay, Linh Uong

Presentations

Will the promise of linked data actually save us time? How will catalogers and machines work together to streamline recording of data and authority maintenance work, allowing catalogers and metadata practitioners to focus more on data stewardship and less on being data scribes? Will Real World Objects (RWOs) and linked data help bridge the gap between traditional cataloging and the larger semantic web communities of practice, ensuring that library metadata supports our users’ search behaviors, those FRBR User Tasks? Or will it just provide more maintenance work down the road? This session will explore the potential of linked data and …