It is my pleasure to share the recording and slides (attached) for a wonderful set of presentations made during the CITSIG meeting on Friday, March 8th at 10:00 a.m.
- Applications of the QA Catalogue for Analysing Library Data –David Floyd (Chief Cataloging Librarian, Subject Librarian for Judaic Studies), Sasha Frizzell (Catalog/Metadata Management Librarian), Binghamton University
- Practicing Self-care on the Job in Technical Services – Janetta Waterhouse (Associate Dean for Collections, Discovery, and Information Technology Services), Kansas State University
- Homosaurus Usage in the OCLC Database: an Exploratory Analysis – Paromita Biswas (Continuing Resources Metadata Librarian), Amanda Mack (Cataloger in the Film & Television Archive), and Erica Zhang (Metadata Librarian for Open Access), UCLA
I also invite you to check out the the list of all Interest Group Week recordings .
Here are the questions asked during the session with responses provided by presenters:
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How did you go from the QA visualization to identifying the records that needed correction/enhancement?
We started by reviewing the output to compare against our expectations for the quality of the records. Problems we estimated before running the tool and unexpected issues both stood out, which made the corrections/enhancements pretty self-evident.
For example, for the Pleasure Reading collection, we knew we wanted our records to have genre/form terms in the 655 field. The QA tool output helped us easily quantify the number of records missing this field, and we could move forward with corrections.
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Thank you, David and Sasha, very interesting presentation. Once you identified the errors or enhancements needed, how did you approach these enhancements? What were your priorities? What was corrected globally and what manually? Thanks.
We take a team-based approach to most metadata remediation work in our unit. One or two people will lead the project and take care of workflow development and progress tracking. Priorities are always closely tied to the specific project, but more generally, we focus on discoverability and clarity of description.
We have not done a project yet where global corrections (batch editing/correcting) were an effective strategy. With genre/form terms or linking issues with OCLC, we needed to look at the records one at a time.
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You mentioned that the QA tool can assess the quality of subject headings, as well as quantity. Can you give an example of it was used to assess quality?
The QA tool outputs are great at separating subject access terms from controlled vocabularies and uncontrolled keyword terms. We could easily see subject terms in 6XX broken out by their $2 source code. This allowed us to find source codes from vendor-supplied ontologies or terms from vocabularies that are not well used or maintained. From there, we could prioritize the vocabularies we prefer when making enhancements.
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David & Sasha – Thank you for your presentation! Can you talk more about the future idea to use QA Catalogue to assess metadata from vendors? Is this an internal conversation or do you plan to bring it into vendor negotiations? E.g. Have you considered adding metadata requirements to vendor contracts? Or negotiating better rates based on metadata quality?
While as catalogers, we do not participate in the negotiation phase of our vendor relationships, this is still an area of curiosity. However, it is not something we are currently considering as part of our contract agreements.
Thank you again to David, Sasha, Janetta, Parmomita, Amanda, and Erica for sharing their innovative work!
-Kelli Getz & Robin Buser
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Kelli Getz
Chair, Creative Ideas in Technical Services Interest Group
Unit Head of Continuing and Electronic Resources
University of Notre Dame
She/Her/Hers
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