April 2009 Article Abstracts
“Wholly Visionary”: The American Library Association, the Library of Congress, and the Card Distribution Program
By Martha M. Yee
This paper offers a historical review of the events and institutional influences in the nineteenth century that led to the development of the Library of Congress (LC) card distribution program as the American version of a national bibliography at the beginning of the twentieth century. It includes a discussion of the standardizing effect the card distribution program had on the cataloging rules and practices of American libraries. It concludes with the author’s thoughts about how this history might be placed in the context of the present reexamination of the LC’s role as primary cataloging agency for the nation’s libraries.
Series Authority Control at Oregon State University after the Library of Congress’s Series Policy Change
By Richard E. Sapon-White
The Library of Congress (LC) decided to suspend creating series authority records on May 1, 2006 and to transcribe all future series statements as untraced. To evaluate the effect on cataloging workload at Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries, bibliographic records were examined for untraced series statements from June 1, 2006 to December 31, 2007. Series titles were then searched in the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) and corrected to match the authority record, if necessary. Series titles not found in the LCNAF were evaluated according to current cataloging rules and corrected if necessary. Of the 53,911 records added to OSU Libraries’ catalog during the study, 977 (2 percent) had an untraced series statement. Only 60 (6 percent) of the 977 were records created by the LC after the 2006 decision. The majority of records (64 percent) with untraced series statements were records created by the Government Printing Office. Many untraced series were also found in records for materials with publication dates before 2000, most resulting from a serials retrospective conversion project. The data suggest that the LC’s policy change has not created a large cataloging burden and, with relatively little effort, OSU Libraries catalogers are able to continue to provide users with authorized series title access.
Acquisitions Globalized: The Foreign Language Acquisitions Experience in a Research Library
By Judit H. Ward
This paper highlights foreign language titles from the perspective of acquisitions in a large academic research library. Selecting, ordering, cataloging, and providing access to non-English materials reach beyond the boundaries of departments responsible for the individual tasks. Assignments require different levels of language proficiency ranging from bibliographic proficiency to the near-native proficiency of the educated speaker. The highest level of language proficiency is used at the earliest and latest point of technical services (i.e., ordering and cataloging), and the rest requires only bibliographic proficiency or none at all. Because international vendor experiences vary country by country, strong cooperation is critical between the partners in the acquisition process. Vendor-supplied records used for foreign language acquisition purposes seem to have the potential to improve accuracy in bibliographic records.
Creating Organization Name Authority within an Electronic Resources Management System
By Kristen Blake and Jacquie Samples
Staff members at North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries have identified the need for name authority control within E-Matrix, a locally developed electronic resources management (ERM) system, to support collection intelligence, the process of collecting, collocating, and analyzing data associated with a collection to gain a sophisticated understanding of its qualities for strategic planning and decision making. This paper examines the value of establishing authority control over organization names within an ERM system in addition to describing NCSU’s design for conducting name authority work in E-Matrix. A discussion of the creation of a name authority tool within E-Matrix is provided along with illustrations and examples of workflow design and implementation for the assignment of authoritative headings. Current practices related to authority control and ERM systems in academic libraries and within organizations such as the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) are also investigated and summarized to provide context for this project. Future possibilities for the use of this type of authority control on the part of librarians, vendors, and standards bodies are explored.
Descriptive Metadata for Digitization of Maps in Books: A British Library Project
By Kimberly C. Kowal and Christophe Martyn
Hidden special collections are increasingly being made visible and accessible by small digitization projects. In the project described in this paper, the British Library employed existing library standards and systems to accomplish key functions of a project to digitize a selection of maps contained within rare books. The integrated library system, using the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR) and Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) format, acted as a lynchpin, linking directly bibliographic descriptions of both the original and the digital copies of the map, the book containing the map, the digital image, and preservation data and strategy, making the items widely searchable and visible while uniting them with the broader collections.
Automated Metadata Harvesting: Low-Barrier MARC Record Generation from OAI-PMH Repository Stores Using MarcEdit
By Terry Reese
For libraries, the burgeoning corpus of born-digital data is becoming both a blessing and a curse. For patrons, these online resources represent the potential for extended access to materials, but for a library’s technical services department they represent an ongoing challenge, forcing staff to look for ways to capture and make use of available metadata. This challenge is exacerbated for libraries that provide access to their own digital collections. While digital repository software like DSpace, Fedora, and CONTENTdm expose bibliographic metadata through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), few organizations have a simplified method for harvesting and generating Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) records from these metadata stores. Fortunately, a number of tools have been developed that can facilitate the harvesting and generation of MARC data from these OAI-PMH metadata repositories. This paper will examine resources that enhance technical services staff’s ability to use existing metadata, with specific focus on one of these current generation tools, MarcEdit, which was developed by the author and provides a one-click harvesting process for generating MARC metadata from a variety of metadata formats.