The ACRL Technical Services Interest Group invites you to join us for three presentations on
Date: Saturday, January 25th 2020
Time: 4:30-5:30 PM
Place/Room: Loews Philadelphia, Congress A
The following will be 15 minutes presentations with a 5 minute question session.
Celebrating Cuba! Global Discovery of the Cuban National Library's Catalog Records
Dave Van Kleeck, Chair, Cataloging and Discovery Services, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida
This presentation outlines a collaborative effort between the University of Florida (UF) and Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí (BNJM), Cuba's national library, to open their collections to researchers around the world. Known as, Celebrating Cuba!, the initiative is focused on creating broad and deep open access to digital collections that celebrate Cuban patrimony, as well as collaboration in other areas of library work.
One area is a project to contribute the catalog records of BNJM to WorldCat. The goals are to include BNJM records in WorldCat to enable global discovery, to facilitate the creation of a comprehensive bibliography of Cuban resources that would allow BNJM to identify their unique holdings to prioritize for digitization, and to work with international partners to identify other materials for digitization. To date UF has contributed over 130,000 of their records to WorldCat. For approximately 5,500 titles we had to create original MARC records based on images from their scanned catalog cards. The various processes required to create and manipulate the records, including the use of MarcEdit, to form properly formatted MARC records for contribution to WorldCat will be discussed.
From high-level collaboration between library leaders across international borders, to collaboration between department heads at both UF and OCLC, to collaboration between individual team members working on the catalog records, partnership and cooperation have been key to this project. It has opened previously unknown collections to researchers outside of Cuba and will have a major impact on Cuba-related scholarship for decades to come.
Changing methods of streaming video acquisition: Benefits & Challenges
Cara Calabrese, Acquisitions & Access Librarian
Until recently, Miami University Libraries has been focused on collections or streaming video PDAs with minimal library involvement, but as costs blew through budgets, a change needed to be made. Faculty and students have become accustomed to instantaneous access when it comes to their video content and highly value including it their classes. The library opted to move to a mediated model with a former PDA vendor and because of its success in keeping costs manageable while still supporting learning, another streaming video vendor is being added to expand the mediated video options. In addition this change the library has seen librarians wanting to go after individual licenses and hosting rights for high use titles, especially for content not available commercially. For high use titles, a perpetual access option will save money in the long run. I'll go over the benefits of these changes, like staying within budget and increased inter-departmental communication, and what challenges popped up and how we sought to overcome them.
The Digital Humanities: Rethinking of the Roles of Technical Services Librarians
Charlene Chou, Coordinator, Distinctive Collections Technical Services
Digital scholarship has been swiftly and deeply changing the research methodologies of humanities scholars, and grants have been specially provided for the creation of these digital platforms in recent years. The digital humanities have been enabling scholars to turn big corpora into big data and to present their research results with the tools of data visualization in the context of time and space. Their needs for research resources have been shifting from print/e-resources to datasets, supporting distant reading of textual data for text mining by machine. On the other hand, many project leaders have shared concerns about the long-term financial sustainability of their platforms and the expertise of system maintenance. Quite a few digital platforms are created by the scholars and the technology staff without any collaboration with librarians at all.
This presentation will explore and discuss what the impact of digital humanities may be on library technical services. Will the roles of technical services librarians be redefined with new scope and skill sets? What might be missing in the infrastructure of digital platforms? For example, some digital platforms do not have any identity management and controlled vocabularies. When keywords fail to provide consistent and precise search results, shall we pursue a better option to optimize discovery through providing quality metadata? Interoperability can resolve the silo problem of digital platforms, and it requires metadata to be compliant with international standards for international data sharing such as ISO (International Organization for Standardization). For maintaining digital platforms as ecosystems, library technical services will be involved with parts of workflows such as digital preservation, acquisition and metadata.
Hope to see you all there!
Cynthia A. Romanowski, Convener
Marina E. Morgan, Incoming Convener
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Cynthia Romanowski
Technical Services Librarian
Governors State University Library
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