Reading #2

Weir, R. O. (2012).  Acquiring Electronic Resources. In Managing Electronic Resources (pp. 37-51). Chicago: ALA.

Traditionally, the acquisition phase focused primarily on ordering, receiving and paying for proprietary published materials.  In the online environment, however, the responsibilities have expanded.  When ordering electronic materials, librarians encounter more exceptions to the rule and cannot assume that the resource type will dictate work flow.  Instead, other important traits should be considered- such as quantity, purchase type, costs, archival rights, vendor and license terms- that will influence initial and ongoing purchase procedures.  In addition, the librarian is responsible for gathering and distributing information that will determine the access and discovery setup process.  The action items may be performed by the librarian or passed to other colleagues, depending on roles and responsibilities.  Electronic resources are constantly changing and evolving.  As such, this chapter is only an overview of considerations identified at one snapshot of time.   By no means is it intended to be a definitive and exhaustive “encyclopedia” of acquisitions issues, but rather a sampling of possibilities in the online environment. 

Week 18: Librarian as Supporter, or Scholar in her own right?

This week I was feeling much better, but I decided to take Monday off to fully recover.  On Wednesday I attended the Digital Library Brown Bag talk.  This week it was presented by my supervisor Michelle Dalmau and she talked about her experience at a Digital Humanities and Libraries THATCamp.   Many of the participants felt that their discussions and experiences would help other digital librarians to better define and promote their unique roles as information professionals.  I was particularly struck by how many librarians, digital librarians specifically, seem to want to get away from the notion or idea that we are solely in a service position.  They seem to want to prove to faculty members and professors that they can participate in research in addition to supporting research.  This active role is what I desire to have and I loved that this was brought up.  However, I don’t think being in a service role is necessarily a bad thing.  This is what at first drew me to librarianship.  My views and emphasis have shifted a bit as I have become a more skilled and experienced librarian, but we can’t forget our duty to our patrons and information seekers at large. 

After attending the talk, I edited the Schematron I have been writing.  There were a few issues with it and so I spent some time editing it for the body, encoder and editor versions.  I also worked on MODS mapping for the core fields.  There was a bit of a template to work with, but most of it I had to do from scratch.   When there were some lulls in the day I continued reading on electronic resources. 

Week 17: Sick Ness

This week I had the flu.  I came in to the office on Monday and continued some work on the Schematron body checks.  I then moved on to doing some more reading on electronic resource acquisition.  I have been interested in that for some time, but I have never really had much experience with it.  I work with electronic records a bit, but I have always wondered about their acquisition and management.  After working for about 3 hours I knew something was wrong when I felt like I had been hit by a truck and couldn’t stop sneezing.  I decided that my bed was where I needed to be and I ended up staying there for the rest of the week.  

Reading #1

Weir, R. O. (2012). Coping with Economic Issues and a Paradigm Shift in Collections.  In Managing Electronic Resources (pp. 17-36). Chicago: ALA.

The economic recession and the resulting decreased or flat budgets have pushed librarians to come up with creative ways to persevere and continue providing patrons with excellent customer service and better chosen resources.  Many librarians have reevaluated collection development models, implementing pay-per-view and patron-driven acquisition ideas and relying on interlibrary loan to fill patron needs.  Some other ways to face an uncertain financial future include partnering with library consortia for reduced rates on electronic resources, canceling “big deals,” using open-source, freely available to libraries worldwide, homegrown ERMSs, and evaluating electronic resources using COUTNER usage statistics.  While it is impossible to predict what the future holds, it is likely that librarians will continue collaboration with one another and with publishers on finding solutions to continue serving their patrons’ needs. 

Week 16: Back at it!

This week I was back at the DLP after winter break.  I was looking forward to getting back to work especially since I felt like I was on a roll before with the Image Collections Online work.  Immediately I got into the process of beginning to define the Photocat core fields and put that information into the Wiki.  Before I had left for winter break, the Metadata Working Group had narrowed the core set down to 12 fields.   Now, the core set had expanded a bit, to 16 fields.  The working group added ACCESSION_NUMBER, CALL_NUMBER, DATE_TAKEN and STATUS.  These fields were added after we received feedback from collection managers and other users of Photocat. 

In addition to defining the core fields, I moved onto defining the remaining non-core fields.  These include over 75 fields that are either too specific to a collection to be included in the core, or are just not used very frequently by any collection.  The definitions for these fields were a little more complicated due to the fact, as mentioned before, that many of them are collection specific.  There were other fields that were a bit confusing.  The difference between PHOTOGRAPHER_STUDIO and PHOTOGRAPHIC_AGENCY is negligible and to write a clear definition that captures that slight distinction is difficult.  But it is necessary to do in order to provide catalogers with the best possible field to describe their collection. 

On top of working on ICO stuff, I also continued work on Schematron for the body of the document.  These are slightly different and while there are not as many checks, the XPath and queries may be a bit more difficult.  I can tell I am really using my XPath skills and understanding-of-XML-document chops. 

Reading #9

Park, J. R., & Tosaka, Y. (2010).  Metadata quality control in digital repositories and collections: Criteria, semantics, and mechanisms. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 48(8), 696-715.

A systematic assessment of practices and issues that affect the quality of metadata in digital repositories and collections is reviewed.  The researchers distributed a web-based survey to approximately 600 participants, mostly heads of cataloging and technical services, via mailing lists relevant to the field.  A total of 303 people completed the survey.  The results of the surveys can be categorized in the following three ways:  perceived importance of metadata quality control, criteria in use to measure metadata quality, and the utilization of quality control mechanisms in digital repositories.  Of note, the study found that metadata semantics is perceived to be less important than content standards for quality control.  This contrasts with 45% and 41% of respondents stating that semantic overlaps and ambiguities, respectively, are the two most significant factors that arise in the application of Dublin Core for their collections.  This study emphasizes the need for a strong awareness of content-based metadata quality control in collaboration with metadata guidelines to guarantee consistency in resource description within and across digital collections. 

Week 14 &15: Finishing up

So, these past two weeks I have not done much work because I have basically finished up my hours.  I have been coming in about once a week, and those hours may end up counting towards my internship next semester. 
Last week, week of 11/26, I came to the Metadata Working Group meeting to discuss the findings of the survey.  We received 13 responses, which was great!  Based on the survey results we further refined the core set and also made the following conclusions:
          1. There is not much of a unique cataloging emphasis.
          2. The primary goal of the collections/collection managers is end-user discovery.
          3. The majority of collections’ external records share some info with Photocat.
          4. The core set as presented in the survey is not satisfactory.

The following fields are all now (some more confidently than others) in the core:

• ABSTRACT
• CAPTION
• CITY
• CREATOR
• COPYRIGHT OWNER
• COPYRIGHT STATUS      
• COUNTRY
• FEATURED
• MODIFYING USER
• TITLE
• TOPICAL SUBJECT
• US STATE

Also, now I have begun compiling the core set definitions.  I have sent out an email to the members of the metadata subgroup and hope to hear some responses soon.

This week, week of 12/3, I came in on 12/6 to meet with Michelle to finalize everything and have her sign the evaluation.  After our meeting, I started some MODS mapping for the core fields that the group has decided upon.  So far, I have all of the mappings except for three fields: COPYRIGHT STATUS, FEATURED and MODIFYING USER. I am really not sure if it is possible to even map those to MODS, so I will wait until next semester to speak to Julie about it. 

So, I guess I am finished for this semester.  I really appreciate the opportunity I had working here and with the great people at the DLP.  I really am glad that I got a good, gentle introduction to XPath and XSL.  I hope to get further acquainted with them in the future.   I also learned that Schematron is not an easy thing to work on, especially when there are hangups.  It is not this ubiquitous thing like XML or TEI, so it was tough to find a good community to consult with when we were having problems.  It also was hard to find relevant literature on Schematron that wasn't just guidelines or documentation.  Hopefully, Schematron will catch on, because it is a really useful tool.  I will not wrap this up entirely, since I will be back in a few weeks to document another 4 1/2 months of my experiences at the Digital Library Program.