Erin Freas-Smith: Erin Freas-Smith: Acquisitions and Metadata Librarian, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (efre@loc.gov):
“African Academic Print Journal Project: Producing and Sharing Article-Level Metadata for Print-Only African Academic Journals.” The Library of Congress has one of the largest historical collections in the world of academic print journals from Africa. Despite this substantive collection, many academic researchers might not know of the primary source materials contained within these print journals, nor have time to delve fully into the Library’s vast collection. In order to conduct research, scholars would need to order entire runs of each publication with the hope that an individual issue has the information they seek. In an effort to bring this metadata to light and increase usage of these important resources, the Africa Section of the African, Latin American & Western European Division, Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access Directorate at the Library of Congress embarked upon a pilot project in 2018 to explore the value and practicality of creating article-level metadata for the Library’s vast collection of print-only African journals. The project has three aims: 1) electronically capture table of contents data from journal titles; 2) transcribe article-level metadata for maximum browsing and discoverability; and 3) upload the two components into a database that in future will be available to researchers across the globe. During this presentation, Freas-Smith will describe best practices established for the project, including the methodology used to display the metadata. She will also describe the challenges of navigating such a large amount of data, including making the metadata visible to researchers through the Library’s Integrated Library Management System, and will provide an overview of the technical processes of the pilot project.