Please join the ALA Core Catalog Management Interest Group for its Core Virtual Interest Group Week session! The meeting will take place on Friday, March 10, 2023 from 12:00-1:00 PM (CST). Please see the full session description below.
Call numbers, oh call numbers on ebooks, why have you forsaken us!
Presenters:
David Schuster, Binghamton University, Senior Director for Library Technology and Digital Strategies
Sasha Frizzell, Binghamton University, Catalog / Metadata Management Librarian
ILS vendor Knowledge bases (KB) are built in a black box. The quality of the metadata is not the concern of the ILS vendor which then leads to missing data, which impacts discoverability. Comparing records of two ILS vendors KBs has shown a disparity in how they manage metadata. We are evaluating multiple ebook publishers' data in the KB based on the availability of call numbers and subject headings while looking at resource usage. Exploring ways to improve access by including call numbers and subject headings and discovering the larger problem.
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A survey of description: exploring subject access for diverse communities using Python and R
Presenters:
Brian Clark, Systems and Technical Process Librarian, University of Alabama Libraries
Catherine Smith, Head of Metadata and Archival Processing, University of Alabama Libraries
Following the long overdue cancellation of the Library of Congress Subject Heading "Illegal alien" many libraries are assessing options for remediating problematic descriptive language in their catalogs. However, the size and scope of many collections make it impractical, if not impossible, for libraries to manually review the descriptive language for marginalized/minority groups used throughout their catalogs. This is a problem that necessitates a programmatic solution and, to that end, we have developed a method using Python and R to extract and evaluate data from MARC records in order to gain insight into the broader story being told by our catalog's descriptive language.