It’s time to retool the nature of Authority work October 13, 2011
Posted by Mia in cataloguing, Collections.comments closed
ORCID and ISNI are picking up a bit of steam. Good, because our IR’s have been up and running for some time.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we continue to labour over all this massively redundant, shared authorized headings information. For monographic works that are shared in umpteen similar collections. For headings identifying authors of monographic works.
We can’t seem to start to refocus our attention on authors — scholars? scientists? creators? contributors? — who are producing scholarly content in journals, or self-publishing venues, non traditional media, and so on.
We’re still too deeply ingrained in traditional workflows that do not consider the numbers of creators at our own home institutions who are generating other types of scholarly material.
Release 2009B 1.3 Upgrade success July 5, 2011
Posted by Mia in cataloguing, Circulation, CLUES/WebPAC, Collections, ERM Module.comments closed
Successfully upgraded to r 2009B this morning in record time, with minimal disruption. Woot! A few glitches to be sure, but otherwise, quite smooth for day 1. The example set is looking pretty good, I must say, and things are being stabilized.
The actual library workstations need to be upgraded and re-imaged, but that is apparently being scheduled in as-we-speak. As we cycle through the staff modules, I expect will be some issues that will start cropping up.
Onwards and upwards.
RDA fatigue September 30, 2010
Posted by Mia in cataloguing, RDA.comments closed
I must admit that I’m starting to suffer from RDA fatigue. Actually, that would really be RDA-L fatigue. I check in about every 30 (50?) messages or so on RDA-L, and usually tune right back out.
Metadata quality and content standards matter to me. So does sanity. Hopefully we won’t be looking through the wrong end of telescope when we start thinking about implementing RDA.
The universe will be fine if there isn’t ultra-uniform adhesion to the way bibliographic references and indexes are going to be recorded in the notes area. For goodness sake.
RDA May 31, 2009
Posted by Mia in cataloguing, FRAD, FRBR, Resource Description and Access.comments closed
On Friday I attended the full day pre-conference session in Montreal on RDA — with some FRBR and FRAD thrown in. I wanted to hear Tom Delsey before he exits as the editor of RDA, and he drew out some of the major differences between AACR and RDA.
Although the RDA online tool still is not yet ready for prime time, there was a tantalizing demo which no doubt created more questions than answers. While it promises to be a sophisticated tool, the learning curve may be substantial, which will certainly be an unfortunate distraction. However, it appears that by the time the product makes its actual debut, there may be some prefab workflows that are plug-and-play — at least, I hope so. The ability to customize things will be great, but of course, that can only come later — you first have to gain some familiarity with the product, and understand the nature of the exercise.
Cataloguers don’t start from total scratch, and a content standard is not a self-contained universe without any reference points in the real world. We progress through a series of fact-checking exercises which emanate from our cataloguing assumptions, and we carry out these exercises according to various norms and conventions.
When we have identified a creator of a work and postulate a name for said creator, our conjecture will be checked by a lookup against other sources — e.g., authority files or bibliographic databases – including the parent institution’s catalogue– to see if our assumptions can be validated against other existing known entities — other publications, or characteristics that we associate with the creator (birthplace or other factual info, for example), etc.
We first try to find an anchor, something that we know, and build upon that. So the case studies that will help illuminate the process (and highlight some of the difficulties) should progress from a variety of straight-forward simple scenarios and increase in complexity (e.g., music).
Custom load tables for e-books December 10, 2008
Posted by Mia in cataloguing, Circulation, CLUES/WebPAC, Collections.comments closed
A while back I graduated myself to building custom load tables for e-books that automagically create and populate a checkin record on the way in. This replaces our older method of attaching item records for e-book bibs. When you thnk about it, item records are essential for tracking discrete physical items, and don’t have much utility for a virtual resource. That’s not to say that item records don’t still play a role for tracking certain kinds of information, but their use as a component of the presentation layer is what needed to be re-examined.
The custom load table takes the 856 info which is resident in the bib, and maps it to a checkin record for display in the WebPAC. Thus, no 856 link remains as part of the bib, but rather is transmuted into a checkin record with a linking field. Checkin records can be associated with resources in ERM, and can be made to act in a smarter fashion than item records
We now employ this model — that is, to automatically generate a checkin record, rather than an item record — when we load bib records for e-books (loosely termed), and it seems to be working out pretty nicely. We’ve used this method for sets of records for things like the Canadian Publishers Collection, as well as EEBO and will use it for ECO records as well.
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