Reported by Marina Morgan, ACRL Technical Services Interest Group Convener
The ACRL Technical Services Interest Group held its ALA Midwinter virtual meeting on Sunday, January 24, 2021, at 12:00 PM CT, with 92 in attendance. The meeting consisted of three presentations as follows:
Adding Cyrillic Script to WorldCat / John Riemer, Head, Resource Acquisitions & Metadata Services, UCLA, and Cynthia Whitacre, Senior Metadata Operations Manager, OCLC
The presentation discussed both the cooperative nature of the work between UCLA and OCLC, resulting in the addition of Cyrillic to over 1 million WorldCat records for Russian language titles in 2020. This prototype project has been expanded to other Cyrillic languages and one other non-Latin alphabetic script. It can serve as a model for other future collaborative projects to add non-Latin script to bibliographic records. The result benefits libraries and researchers throughout the world, making the collections more accessible on a global scale.
Translations as a Representation of Cultural Bias / Sarah Theimer, Cataloging and Metadata Librarian, University of New Hampshire
This presentation addressed how publishers' attitudes towards translations have changed over time, how libraries have described translations, and suggest improvements. Many libraries have built collections with a Eurocentric focus. These collections contain translations so that English readers can experience literary works originally written in other languages. Translations, when completed by someone without sufficient preparation, can be misguided and produce false representations. Some translations say more about the target culture than the source culture. The translator data that was missing from the UNH catalog and the HathiTrust catalog was shown. Additionally, it was described how HathiTrust Digital Library digital files were used to compare token lists. Data visualization was created allowing users to compare the Anna Karenina English translations available in the HathiTrust.
Visualization of Digital Collections as a Method of Metadata Assessment / Monika Glowacka-Musial, Metadata Librarian at New Mexico State University Library
The purpose of this presentation was to demonstrate how visualization of digital collections' data created in R programming language can be used for screening and evaluating collections' metadata, and identifying their common issues, including missing values, misplaced values, and all sorts of values' inconsistencies, such as typos and other manual errors, OCR generated special characters, etc. These common metadata issues were discussed based on specific examples drawn from graphic representations created for digital collections at the New Mexico State University Library.
We thank John Riemer, Cynthia Whitacre, Sarah Theimer, and Monika Glowacka-Musial for their presentations, and to all participants for attending our session.
Please find attached the presentation slides.
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Marina Morgan
Metadata Librarian
Modern Languages Liaison
Florida Southern College, Roux Library
Phone: +1 (863) 616-6450
Email:
mmorgan@flsouthern.edu------------------------------