Please join the ALCTS CaMMS Heads of Cataloging Departments Interest Group at the ALA Annual 2018 Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Monday, June 25, 9:00-10:00 a.m.
Morial Convention Center, rooms 279-280 (Theater)
For more information about the program, contact co-chairs Martin Knott (amuro@umich.edu) and Angela Kinney (anki@loc.gov).
Ellen K.W. Mueller (Head, Technical Services, University of Michigan)
Collective Cataloging: Sharing the Load Across a Consortium
The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) is a consortium representing 14 universities in the Midwest and mid-Atlantic region; the Libraries initiatives include these fourteen universities in addition to the University of Chicago. This presentation will share the steps the BTAA took to build and implement a pilot tracking costs, workflows, challenges, and opportunities associated with sharing cataloging expertise for languages and resource formats needed across participating libraries, and how this pilot morphed and grew into a healthy multi-institutional partnership. Attendees will hear about the classic challenges cooperative cataloging poses and how the BTAA Cooperative Cataloging Partnership has countered these. The partnership will receive the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during ALA Annual 2018. Though geared towards managers of cataloging and technical services, others in collection development may benefit from these lessons learned.
Casey A. Mullin (Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services, Western Washington University)
The Adolescent Institutional Repository: Metadata Management Perspectives and Challenges
Western Washington University’s institutional repository, branded “CEDAR” and powered by the BePress Digital Commons platform, was established in 2014 and has grown to include thousands of objects. While the rich collections within CEDAR have been devotedly developed over the past four years, the metadata describing them have a more checkered history. Objects carrying robust descriptive metadata live alongside those with skeletal descriptions, owing to a diversity of staff processes and resulting metadata “life stories” among the collections. Furthermore, the visibility of CEDAR objects in WWU’s discovery layer OneSearch exacerbates indexing and retrieval issues. Concurrently, metadata policy and practices for other digital collections hosted at WWU have matured, approaching their own “adulthood” in a forthcoming MODS-based digital asset management system. Casey Mullin, Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services at WWU, will discuss the challenges of navigating the complex institutional history around digital collections, while pursuing familial harmony among metadata practices across all library collections.
David Van Kleeck (Interim Chair, Cataloging Services, University of Florida)
Toward Solving Legacy Metadata Issues and Improving Discoverability in Digital Collections
The University of Florida Digital Collections (UFDC) is an actively growing open access digital library comprised of over 500,000 records. As with any large scale digital library project, a well-known challenge is the varying quality and quantity of legacy metadata available for each title. In modern systems, access to the digital content is heavily dependent on effective metadata. If users cannot find what they are looking for, a great deal of human effort is wasted. Subject terms are often one of the most efficient methods for accessing desired materials and subject terms created from controlled vocabularies deliver the most consistent results. To date, applying and editing subject metadata has been a record-by-record, labor-intensive process making the prospect of retrospective projects cost-prohibitive. For a pilot project, the UFDC team working with consultants will investigate the capacity of research library staff to implement a Machine Assisted Indexing system to automate the process of selecting and applying subject terms, based on the use of a rule-base and controlled vocabularies, to the metadata of a body of digitized content. If the implementation is successful, the enhanced metadata will be added to openly available catalog records, including OCLC records, making the enhancements available to the majority of North American libraries. This presentation, co-authored with Chelsea Dinsmore, will discuss the process of implementation as well as preliminary findings with regard to challenges and future directions.