Posts in topic: cataloging

WorldCat knowledge base: A new infrastructure for e-resource management

Mary Sauer-Games

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The WorldCat knowledge base connects library users to the electronic content provided by their libraries. The latest update is the result of a major multi-year investment that strengthens OCLC’s foundation and provides benefits across many products and services. To learn more about this effort and our commitment to ongoing innovation, please watch a short video featuring Mary Sauer-Games, OCLC’s Vice President of Global Product Management.

Curious about how it works? Take a look at what’s inside WorldCat.

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The cat that didn’t bark

David Whitehair

About a year ago, OCLC completed a two-year project (funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) with the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) that, among other enhancements, added support for the registration of serial retention commitments in WorldCat. These enhancements not only help improve discovery of shared print data (PDF) across all OCLC services, but also bolster CRL’s Print Archives Preservation Registry (PAPR) and other partner efforts.

At the time that project was completed, we estimated OCLC and its member institutions would register about 15 million commitments over the course of the year. As of today, the community has actually added more than 25 million retention commitments.

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Make your library a hub for open access content

Dr. Thomas E. Phillips

The library that I am entrusted to manage, the Open Access Digital Theological Library (OADTL), has a clear mission. We aim to make high-quality, open access content in religious studies discoverable to the global community through a single, curated search experience. Even though it may seem like an unreachable goal, I bet you could write a similar mission for your institution.

Fill in the blank:

Our library is committed to making high-quality, open access content in [our area of expertise] discoverable to the global community through a single, curated search experience.

Feels good to imagine, doesn’t it? Well, I’m here to tell you how you can accomplish that goal with very little overhead cost and no increase in staff.

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Time-traveling librarians, shared print, and being excellent to each other

Matt Barnes

There’s a scene in the movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where they lament that they need some keys that were lost two days earlier. But because they have a time machine, they can just wait until later, go back in time before they’re lost, and leave them right next to where they are “now” for convenience.

It’s funny, of course. But also, kind of … smart. It shows that if you can count on someone doing something in the future, you can make current plans based on that knowledge. The trick is, each of us has to know what the other is planning.

Bill and Ted can rely on a future (and past) version of themselves to complete their plans. Library staff have to rely on shared data and common, agreed-upon signals across our collective collection.

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The Music OCLC Users Group: You say you want an evolution

Jay Weitz

The Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG), the first and oldest of the OCLC cooperative’s user groups, has spent its 40+ year history working to improve access to music materials in libraries. Often that work has felt like an identity crisis as it sought to reconcile its cataloging-centric origins with its public services evolution. But the dedicated professionals associated with MOUG have kept at it over more than four decades because of the guiding notion that if you can make products and services function well for the complexities of music resources, they will work well for any resources.

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Five data analytics questions to help secure—or increase—your e-resource budget

Justin Parker

5 questions

By Justin Parker, Subscriptions Manager, University of Manchester Library, and
Tim O’Neill, Electronic Resources Coordinator, University of Manchester Library

As Subscriptions Manager and Electronic Resources Coordinator at the University of Manchester, part of our jobs is to make sure the university gets the best deal on its e-resource investment. But what does “best deal” really mean? Does it mean the least expensive materials? Well, an inexpensive subscription isn’t a good deal if it isn’t used at all. And even free, open source content has a cost associated with the cataloging, discovery, and course management systems we use to make it available.

The challenge is to find better ways to assess the value our students, teachers, and researchers gain from the e-resources we provide. And the end result should be a better plan for accurately conveying the importance of library collections within the larger goals of the institution. But how do you get there? Having spent some time recently tracing the pathways of e-resource usage, we have a few suggestions.

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How a network of data curators can unlock the tremendous reuse value of research data

Lisa R. Johnston

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Data reuse is a major focus for institutional research groups and their funders and it’s easy to see why. After the (often) expensive process of collecting, analyzing, and mining research data for valuable new knowledge, any additional attention, such as the publication, reference, or reuse of that data, multiplies its value.

But understanding researchers’ behaviors and needs when it comes to data sharing and reuse is challenging. Each discipline has unique norms and practices for how they collect and manage data, when (and if) they share their data, and how they determine a dataset’s fitness for reuse. Data curators—as information science practitioners—make a wealth of decisions and take well-informed actions to ensure that selected data have meaningful and enduring value to future research.

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Let’s cook up some metadata consistency

Ixchel M. Faniel, Ph.D.

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Let’s say you’re writing a cookbook and describing ingredients. For sure you’re going to want to be consistent from one recipe to the next. If you don’t want to confuse your readers, it’s good not to refer to one amount as “a pinch” in one recipe and “a dollop” or “a smidge” in another.

Then you look around and realize that other people are writing cookbooks and they have some standards. That’s not a pinch, to them; it’s a teaspoon to some or 5 milliliters to others. What you call a “chunk” everybody else calls “a quarter cup” or “32 grams.” So, you need to be consistent not just within your own cookbook, but with others’ cookbooks, regardless of the dish being prepared—roasts, stir fries, desserts, soups, etc.

Librarians and archivists in data repositories are learning to think like this as well. Because the data being deposited for reuse has much greater value to their institutions when the metadata attached to it are consistent at the study level, the data level, and the file level.

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Always judge a book by its cover

Brittany Brannon

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We asked students to identify the types of containers from which online information is taken. Information containers can be important, obviously, because they provide critical context when evaluating the quality of sources. One said:

“This one looks like a—wait, I can’t tell what that is, but it looks like a book.”

Wait. It… looks like a book? Let’s try again:

“Pretty sure it had an ISBN number. It’s an article. Oh, no, books usually have—well, you can download the entire book or download the chapter. So, I’m thinking it’s a book. And it doesn’t have the edition, but I kind of want to say it’s a book about this book.”

That’s closer, but we can do better.

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To the rescue: How academic libraries can support humanities monographs through open access

Suzanne Kemperman

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When we think about open access (OA) publishing in academia, it’s very often about articles. That is, relatively short, data- and research-focused pieces in peer-reviewed journals. Trends in open science, public funding, cost containment, and library collection development have driven a lot of those conversations, and they’re important.

Today, though, I’d like to talk about the scholarly monograph. Book-length content published as a stand-alone work is not the norm for many of the hard sciences. But it is often the end result of important work done in the humanities, liberal arts, and social sciences—and often required for tenure and promotion in those disciplines.

The trends we’re seeing in OA for article-level materials are very promising. But they also often work against monograph publishing, which is not good for academic presses working in the humanities.

There is an opportunity here, however, for academic libraries to engage in OA publishing to promote and protect the work being done by their humanities scholars.

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