Below you will find an interesting mix of topics for the ALCTS/LITA Authority Control Interest Group (ACIG) meeting at Midwinter.
Sunday, February 1
1:00 PM-3:00 PM (with a business meeting to follow)
McCormick Place West
Room W474b
Scheduler link: http://alamw15.ala.org/node/25803
We hope you can join us!
Nathan Putnam
2014-2015 ACIG Chair
Head, Metadata Services
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 0742
nbputnam@umd.edu
Janis L. Young (Senior Cataloging Policy Specialist, Policy and Standards Division (PSD)) will be giving her regular semi-annual report from Library of Congress, including updates on authorities projects, staffing changes at Library of Congress, and updates to tables and documentation.
Ray Schmidt (Assistant Director for Discovery Services, Wellesley College, and chair of the Music Library Association Authorities Subcommittee) will discuss ways to advocate for the value of authority work. The MLA Statement on Authority Control will be presented as a starting point for considering the real-world situations in which the need for advocacy arises, and how catalogers can prepare to demonstrate what library users “get” from authority control.
Diane Hillmann (partner in the consulting firm Metadata Management Associates LLC and previously Authorities Library at Cornell University Libraries) will briefly discuss general issues and how vocabulary versioning has been handled in the RDA Registry. She will demonstrate how those principles and best practices can be used in other kinds of authority files. Policies regarding change management in open or public vocabularies used in the context of Linked Open Data have lagged behind those driving other web-based communities of practice. The same can be said of Authority Files, developed for use within a centralized data flow and centralized maintenance policies, with contributions by a broadly distributed community. This centralized control has been workable (if slow to evolve to incorporate new needs) during the MARC years, so long as data distribution had also been centralized, but this pattern of distribution has become more questionable as a transition to the more open world of linked data begins to demonstrate the inflexibility of traditional practices.
Jeremy Myntti (Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah) and Nate Cothran (Vice President, Automated Services, Backstage Library Works) will discuss the University of Utah’s J. Willard Marriott Library's and Backstage Library Works ideas to come up with an automated solution for authorizing fields in digital library metadata to provide consistency and to improve access to collections. This project was originally presented at ALA Annual 2013 at the beginning of the project. We have now completed processing the metadata for several digital collections. This presentation will show the results from this project, including lessons learned and future directions for the project to prepare this metadata for a linked data environment.