Monday, September 24, 2018

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Celia Gavett



1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 
Hi everyone, I'm Celia Gavett. I'm actually at a point of transition between two positions within Columbia Law School's Arthur W. Diamond Law Library, so the invitation to interview for this blog post came at an interesting time! Since January 2016, I have served as the Head of Continuing Resources & Collection Maintenance. Starting October 1st, I will be working as a Law Cataloger (my first post-MS ILS position).

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
Yes, I think the job title for my current position is accurate. As Head of CR & CM, I manage two small teams responsible for print serials processing and maintenance of the stacks, respectively. These two units also handling filing (microforms and print supplementation) and claiming, so although a joint CR & CM unit is perhaps a less common combination, there are several ways that communication and workflows overlap. We are expecting a very large series of book moves within the next year, so I've definitely been thinking more about ways to streamline and improve upon the shift planning processes we've used in the past.

In my upcoming position as Law Cataloger, I'm looking forward to taking on original and complex copy-cataloging of items in various formats and languages. I really enjoy learning new things, and I'm excited to contribute to another area of Technical Services.

3. What are you reading right now?
For work, next on my list is to check out Steven Carl Fortriede's Moving Your Library. Now that I don't have assigned readings from LIS coursework, I'm gradually getting back to more leisure reading too. As a fairly eager home cook, I've enjoyed flipping through J. Kenji López-Alt's The Food Lab over the past couple of months. I know there are a lot of musicians in the law librarianship ranks too, so I'll also mention that I'm trying to get back into playing piano for leisure more regularly -- a couple weeks ago I dusted off my old copy of Mozart sonatas and have found it fun to (badly and stiffly) sight-read a movement or two at a time.

4. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?
Free time is especially unexpected for me these days, since our entire Technical Services Department is working through a complete retrospective inventory project. If I suddenly had a truly free day at work with no sensible catch-up tasks to do, I might take some extra time to play around with some of our ILS's reporting functions, because there's always another interesting tip or quirk to discover. I might also try to study up on a bit of basic bibliographic/legal vocabulary in a language I don't read.

Monday, September 17, 2018

RDA Toolkit update

An American Library Association sponsored webcast, "What's next for RDA and the 3R Project" was presented Friday, September 14, 2018. The presentation provided updates on development of the new version of the RDA Toolkit available at beta.rdatoolkit.org.

The presenters emphasized that changes to the beta toolkit scheduled for implementation September 26, 2018 were at least partially driven by user feedback. These enhancements include improvements to the HTML editor, improvements to search, updates to tools, and improvements to MARC mapping. The RDA Steering Committee plans to have the beta toolkit function in compliance with W3C accessibility guidelines by the end of the year.

In response to a "use case" for a way to cite to particular guidelines in RDA, citation numbers will be introduced. These will be six to eight digit numbers randomly associated with instructions. They will be "invisible" but searchable within the toolkit.

The presenters again emphasized consistence in structure across instructions; every element will be laid out in the same order. This "boilerplate" is a feature of the content management system used to edit the beta toolkit. Reusable components will enable more efficient updates and translations.

Since RDA is an implementation and extension of the IFLA LRM, the RSC is now able to resolve gaps and inconsistencies within the toolkit. The editors continue to add and adjust content on a regular basis including 96 elements to be added as part of a new Appellation element and modeling of aggregates and serials within the framework of the IFLA LRM.

Navigation and utility should be enhanced by the addition of a "relationship matrix" and a graphical browser intended to show elements in context.

Workshop slides and an archived recording of the session are available. The RDA Toolkit also has a YouTube Channel with links to other presentations.

Friday, September 14, 2018

BIBFRAME Update Forum at the ALA Annual Conference 2018



https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/news/bibframe-update-an2018.html

A BIBFRAME update forum was held at the 2018 ALA Annual Conference with presentations from institutions reporting on projects underway.
Jodi Williamschen, Library of Congress, gave an update on BIBFRAME Pilot 2.0.  She reported that recent infrastructure improvements at LC have been made with the addition of servers and software updates.  The BIBFRAME database, updated daily, contains over 17 million MARC records that have been converted to BIBFRAME Works.
A BIBFRAME 2.0 Implementation Register https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/implementation/register.html is available on the LC website.  Located here is information about a project undertaken at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library (UIUC) that focused on creating an interface and converting 7,829 Dublin Core items to BIBFRAME 2.0.  A link is provided to the UIUC Bibframe search interface http://sif.library.illinois.edu/bibframe/search2.php.
A presentation by Tiziana Possemato, Casalini Libri - @Cult, From MARC to BIBFRAME in the SHARE-VDE project, highlighted a collaborative linked data endeavor developed by Casalini Libri (European bibliographic and authority data provider) and @Cult (ILS and Discovery tool provider).  Initial input for the project was received from sixteen North American Research Libraries.
Jeremy Nelson, Metadata & Systems Librarian at Colorado College and co-founder of Knowledgelinks.io presented a model for using BIBFRAME in a multi-institutional projects.  The project known as Plains to Peaks collective attempts to unite isolated digital collections located across Colorado and Wyoming into one platform.
Nathan Putnam, Director, Metadata Quality, OCLC discussed the OCLC Research process in converting approximately 11 million MARC records to BIBFRAME 2.0.  Through the process the team learned the importance of Work IDs and URI.  OCLC remains committed to working with LC to support development of BIBFRAME
For links to individual presentations and further information see the BIBFRAME webpage at the Library of Congress website https://www.loc.gov/bibframe/news/bibframe-update-an2018.html