The Heads of Cataloging Interest Group Meeting in Seattle, Washington was largely comprised of two excellent presentations focused on enhancing access to library collections. Both speakers presented on projects designed to increase discoverability of materials, one by exploring linked data and the other by more established means. The presenters' slides are available on the ALCTS CaMMS Heads of Cataloging Departments Interest Group website at: connect.ala.org.
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Jodene R. Pappas (Cataloging Services Librarian, Ralph W. Steen Library, Stephen F. Austin State University) led off with her exploration of linked data in libraries. She described a project she undertook that had three aims: 1) to develop her knowledge of linked data, 2) to foster student success by increasing the discoverability and usage of their collections, and 3) to demonstrate the Library's relevance to the university. Much of the current development of linked data in the bibliographic sphere is being undertaken by large academic and national libraries. Her goal was to investigate linked data from the vantage point of a smaller cataloging department in a mid-sized university.
Spurred by a recent large-scale weeding project at Steen Library and knowing that most library users start their research on the Web, Pappas wanted to examine ways of increasing usage of the remaining materials in the library’s collection. With little familiarity of linked data, she developed a pilot project focused on the Congressional papers of U.S. House of Representative Charlie Wilson, and the subject of the book and film entitled Charlie Wilson's War. Knowing that there was broad interest in his papers, she included the materials from the library’s Charlie Wilson Oral History Project in her pilot and used the university's set of strategic directions to help create additional buy-in from administrators. She noted that librarian organize collections to understand them, to collocate materials, and to facilitate retrieval of resources, and outlined linked data's capacity to make these goals more achievable.
After formulating a plan, her process was to start by learning how to incorporate linked data elements into Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) records. She took an online class and learned how to transform records from MARC to MARCXML in Resource Description Framework (RDF) syntax. She also used a record for one of the library’s finding aids using the Library of Congress's BIBFRAME Comparison Tool [1] to learn more about linked data records, and found that the transformed data could be loaded into a repository like Wikidata for later discovery. Still ahead of her are to find a host for the transformed data so that the resources are discoverable using search engines, and to compare usage rates of materials pre- and post-transformation.
Pappas noted in her presentation her next steps for further study as well, including her intention to explore the LD4P Competency Framework for Educators and Learners [2], an index of linked data competencies ranging from basic to expert. She also intends to gain more knowledge around mapping and enhancing RDF data. She concluded with a list of resources for audience members to investigate. Acknowledging the challenges of working alone with limited resources, she presented an inspiring case of "start where you are" and dive into linked data regardless of your knowledge or experience.
[1] http://id.loc.gov/tools/bibframe/compare-id/full-ttl
[2] http://explore.dublincore.net/explore-learning-resources-by-competency/
Dr. Erin Freas-Smith (Acquisitions and Metadata Librarian, Africa Section of the African, Latin American & Western European Division, Library of Congress) followed with an interesting presentation on a project that is centered on the Library of Congress’s African academic print journal collection. The project's goal is to increase access to historic and print-only academic journals from the African continent by enhancing article-level metadata. Freas-Smith noted that there are hundreds of journals that are not being used because of a number of impediments to access. These include a lack of movement by the journals to online publishing, the fact that there are no large journal databases in Africa, that existing catalog records and metadata for the journals is of relatively poor quality, and that many journals tend to have aspirational publishing goals and only publish intermittently. Partnering with other members of the Africana Librarians Council to address these challenges, she focused her project on the 13,000 plus titles held by the Washington, DC office of the Library of Congress (LC), rather than the entire set of more than 36,000 titles held by LC offices worldwide.
Freas-Smith stated that 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 the future will be available to researchers across the globe. Her work began with separating the journal titles by LC Classification and those in the Education class were selected as the starting point. Freas-Smith also chose to structure the work based on the volumes in the Library of Congress’s collections, rather than by title, as it was more expedient in developing a manageable workflow. This was especially true in cases where the volumes contained more than one title. Because of publishing irregularities, it was difficult to tell if all of the issues of a particular journal had been accounted for, and it turned out that many journals had only one issue. Freas-Smith used the services of two graduate student interns, developed a training guide, and trained the interns on the specific tasks of the project. Working with a template, the interns entered metadata into a spreadsheet for each journal. They recorded several pieces of data from the journal, including the journal's title, issue number, article author, article title, analytic keywords, the link to the table of contents scan, and the abstract. There was a librarian there at all times to answer questions from the interns and the serials cataloger in her unit later added or updated records as needed.
The project team had monthly meetings to discuss progress and the interns asked for feedback regularly. They were given latitude to develop their own workflows and offered suggestions that she incorporated into the training guide. Following their departure at the end of the summer, Freas-Smith reviewed the project's progress. Two takeaways became apparent to her. The first was that because the work is so desk-bound, the interns needed the ability to move around during the day, and the second was that she needed to check the interns work more often. There were more errors and inconsistencies than she thought there would be, and it was better to check their work periodically, rather than wait until the end of their internship. Nevertheless, encouraged by the project's progress thanks to the interns’ work, Freas-Smith has since made additional updates to the intern training guide and is planning for resumption of the project this summer. Next steps for the project entail: 1) recruit four more interns to work on the project this summer, 2) look into how other organizations and universities can help, 3) determine how to more efficiently share the work with partner institutions, 4) examine other data capture methods along the lines of Mendeley or RefWorks, rather than relying on manually entering data into spreadsheets, and 5) explore whether the project can make use of the 856 field in the serial records of the journals to hyperlink to scans of the tables of contents data to increase discoverability. Concluding her presentation, Freas-Smith mentioned that she is also exploring the use of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to assist with the project and that she is also investigating the possibility of working with the Center for Research Libraries to act as an agent for African publishers in various capacities, like assisting with Digital Object Identifier (DOI) registrations.
Both presentations were warmly received and generated several questions from the audience at the end. Each speaker presented an innovative project aimed at increasing discoverability and access to their collections. Dovetailing nicely with presentations from other ALCTS interest group and committee meetings at the Midwinter conference, it was encouraging to see the level of inventive engagement by the profession in this area.
Written by David Van Kleeck (co-chair)