From Cancellations to Coding: Pandemic-Centered Tech Topics on Day Two of the OBS/TS Summit 2020

So far, day two of the summit has delivered fantastic programming. I wish I could attend it all! The final virtual event takes place at 6 PM EST tonight. This morning my two favorite sessions both dealt with the new realities we are living in post COVID-19 closures, touching on this from the perspective of budget cuts to work from home workarounds. Here were my takeaways:

Top Left to Bottom Right: Gilda Chiu-Ousland, Wendy Moore, Heather Buckwalkter, Anne Lawless-Collins.

TS Resource Management Roundtable: Budget Cuts & Collecting Pivots
I was really on the fence about which of the earliest morning sessions to attend, and I am so glad I selected this one on resource management and collecting pivots. Wendy Moore from the University of Georgia Law Library led the discussion with a powerful statement that really summarizes the entire roundtable and the timeliness of the topics:

"Crisis can lead to LOTS of creativity."

What followed were introductions from each of the panelists including Heather Buckwalter, Gilda Chiu-Ousland, and Anna Lawless-Collins. Each shared the state of things at their institution, the fallout from COVID-19 closures including the stopping of shipments and the addition of online study aids and other e-resources to help students and faculty get through a quick pivot to virtual learning, and the budget (if they had %'s or figures yet) that they are each facing for fiscal year 2021 and 2022. This session (as with several from day one of the summit) was not recorded to allow attendees to feel more comfortable sharing the details and situations of their library, law school, or larger institution. Two polls were executed in the larger Zoom room before dividing into smaller groups for more personalized and in depth discussions. The polls were very interesting, revealing many of us still do not know our budget, or have vague %'s that are yet to be approved, and that the majority of us are cutting print journals more than any other area of our collections.


In the smaller groups, attendees were better able to share their own situations, including some very creative strategies for how to negotiate with vendors, what data they are using to make those decisions about what and how to cut items from the collection, and what they have already or are planning to cancel to meet the demands of the coming fiscal year. There was a big focus on mitigating expectations of faculty and other stakeholders, and many were open about having these difficult conversations with their faculty members related to monograph acquisitions and with their institutions related to print course reserve materials. Overall an excellent program that was really open to sharing their situations so we can all learn from one another and continue best serving our library users.

Hot Topic: Technologies We Use

Presented by Jesse Lambertson, this session was more of an open discussion than a straight-forward presentation. Sharing his own library system as the beginning example, Lambertson pitched questions to the audience with lively responses in real time and invited members to un-mute and speak to their specific system challenges in the work from home environment. It was really interesting to hear individuals sharing the pros and cons of their various integrated library system platforms once they were catapulted into teleworking. The clear up-side to having a web-based interface was the ease that these librarians and their staff could quickly pivot to working from home without the hassle of using VPN or requiring remote desktop. These included those using TIND and Alma to name a couple. Several of us still working with iii's Sierra were able to join in chorus about our struggles in working from home with spotty VPN support and the differences in Sierra web as compared to the desktop client.

Presenter Jesse Lambertson screen shares Python script snippets hack for working with CSV data.

For importing and exporting records, both individually or in batches, many hacks were shared including creative ways use Marc Edit when working from home and the potential for more API's between Marc Edit and the ILS. It is of course that time of year when we are all gathering statistics. With much overlap from the previous session I attended, many of us commented we are accessing collection and user data much more right now to better inform decision making in a time of budget cuts. As a result, further roadblocks and workflow workarounds were discussed for various systems. Several attendees shared how they query their system for cataloging and other statistics, the issues they experience in the format of the data they pull out, and the obstacles that come with trying to do this type of work from home or with very limited access to the library. Many individuals (myself included!) are periodically retrieving data from their systems, exporting it at txt or csv files, and then taking it home on laptops of flash drives to be able to spend more time with it when teleworking. However, and few shared more innovative approaches to both massaging data as well as collecting and sharing it. Lambertson shared a highly creative approach using Python scripts to automate certain aspects of the csv to Excel conversion of his data. Another attendee shared their library's customized Google Sheets dashboard which pulls data from the ILS into the same location as reference transactions statistics (populated by Google Form responses). A truly fantastic session with lots of open dialogue between attendees. I am so glad I attended and I can't wait to see and hear how the experiential system and data approaches our members are working with now unfold in the coming months and years as access to our offices and systems remains largely unknown during a pandemic.

Functioning at Lightspeed: Day One of the OBS/TS Summit 2020 & Linked Data in Libraries Conference

Screenshot from the Summit's OBS-SIS Business Meeting

Seriously, how fast is time going by these days? It seems like just yesterday I was attending the Work Smarter Not Harder Technical Services virtual conference from Amigos in mid-February, but here we are at the end of July on the heels of AALL 2020! Today the first ever summit of our two special interest sections is literally happening as I type this blog post. I could not contain my excitement for the topics covered so far, and felt compelled to go ahead and blog about two of the sessions. To find out more about the summit schedule which is still underway, (including business meetings too!) visit the AALL Calendar item. A big announcement from the OBS-SIS business meeting is that the official name of the SIS was voted to change to "Library Systems and Resource Discovery"! Now without delay, here are my two favorites with takeaways:

• Facilitating Open Knowledge: The Intersection of Wikidata and Libraries - Presenters shared how "inter-collectional connections broaden the experience to go into parallel and related items". What a fantastic summary of Linked Data, and Wikidata in particular. The hyperlink for this session title will take you to the slides which I highly recommend saving as a resource if you are interested in more Wikidata. Many slides gave specific examples of using Wikidata for legal faculty scholarship.  Of course it was noted in the session and from commenters in the Q&A that "we’re in the wild west days of wikidata (just like wikipedia used to be - it is very community based)." When considering Wikidata, remember that most things in wikipedia are in wiki data, but it is not always true the other way around. The discussion following the presentation focused heavily on "notability". Presenters made sure to comment that Wikidata allows you to create entries for faculty members that might not make it into Wikipedia. Questions were asked like "is just being a faculty member enough notability to be in Wikidata?" But the goal here is to build a robust citation network in Wikidata, adding items to support structure and more. One problem discussed what that not all language versions of Wikipedia have embraced Wikidata (yet) so the benefit of Wikidata is not across the board. Presenters also shared about a new Wiki-project called Wiki abstract which hopes to dynamically pull summaries from Wikidata). The biggest takeaway was “Notability (wikidata) is not the same as bibliographic warrant (authority control - NACO)”.
• Finding the Silver Lining in System Migrations -  What I discovered at the end of this session was that it was originally intended as a large face-to-face program in new Orleans had the AALL annual meeting and conference not gone virtual. It was planned to be a platform-neutral panel with speakers from a variety of law libraries talking about their migrations. As a result of things going virtual, this smaller session amd the one following it (Hot Topic/Local Systems Committee Meeting Making Post System Migration Efficient and Effective") covered the same terrain in two slices. There were so many takeaways from this session that I can't possibly share them all here, and even though the two speakers talked primarily about their library platforms, their joint experiences with systems and the discussion from attendees still rounded the session out to include a vareity of platforms including iii to alma, aleph, tind, wms, folio, sirsi, etc. A few of my favorite quotes and lessons from the presenters included:
• You have to always look out for other people (not just the records you touch)
• Always draw on the experience of people at other institutions who migrated before you, and don't be afraid to ask them "Please help me! How did you do this?"
• You’ve got to build your own team. There’s the team you are forced to be part of (your department, your library, your university, your consortium) and then your own external team. That is the team you can build yourself, where you can gather info about the migration process from those at other institutions, and share it with others like you later after you have gone through it. 
• Carve out management and leadership opportunities for staff and other librarians  using migration as the backbone, since it is such a major effort, it can be a milestone for any individual's professional growth and take them further in their career. 
• Turn it into a bootcamp (like a mini 2 day conference) where you are migrating from one platform to another. Invite others in your area going through the same process (example was a DC area libraries migrating from Sierra to Alma). 
• Know that other things may have to be sacrificed along the way. You will not survive migration if you try to do everything you have always done during a migration (or any other major project). If you’re the manager, you should be shielding your team from the onslaught of "all the things" during a big migration.
• If you keep trying to do it all you will not do any of it very well...and you may not make it. You have to think about prioritizing things in advance. What will you stop or delay to get the new, major work done? 
• 3 years out and many are STILL cleaning up post-migration data messes. But it becomes the new normal… so it will be OK!
• Get to know and use your university IT department as much as you can. That has been more helpful for people migrating than their law school's IT when there is not an ILS expert in your library or a true systems librarian at your library. 
• Negotiate with staff and librarians to parse out what they really want and need to know how to do (you may need to reference interview the reference librarians!)
• Host a series of in-person if you can (or virtual if you can't) sessions to show staff and librarians how to do all the things they need for workflows as a live demo.
• Keep track of your training offerings and other documentation so you can show you did your due diligence for your library.

Also still currently happening throughout this week is TONS of programming from the Linked Data in Libraries 2020 Conference. The entire slate of sessions have been FREE to attend! You can find the schedule including links to the sessions in sched. You can also find all completed session recordings in the YouTube LD4 2020 playlist. I'm going to embed that below, but first my favorite session (so far) was today's "Linked Data for Sound" session. This excellent live program presented the work of Bethany Radcliff of the University of Texas in Austin. She talked about AudiAnnotate, and shared all of the resources related to the project. The session slides are available online, which include links to GitHub and all of the other pieces of this project. It was fascinating to hear how Bethany is using Linked Data in a practical way to make audio more accessible. The tool is also being used by professors as a teaching tool for literary criticism. Part of Bethany's resources realted to AudiAnnotate include short virtual workshops that show you how to download and use Audactiy (one of my personal favorite free audio editing tools!) to make annotations to audio of all kinds. The discussion was interesting and robust too, with attendees speculating how the tool could be expanded and adapted for video, or for non-traditional audio recordings like bird songs. The conversations and discussions are continuing throughout this week on LD4 2020's slack channel. Join in if you can, and watch the wide variety of sessions (there are 46 videos and counting!!) that already have recordings available in YouTube below:

 

Top 5 TS-Centric Webinar & Virtual Conference Highlights

The increase of wonderful, FREE programming being delivered virtually right now and available to audiences around the world is truly amazing. It can be overwhelming to sift through the options (especially if your inbox has exponentially exploded as mine has over the past 3 months). Take a trip back in time with me as I share below my favorite sessions that I feel offered the most valuable content to those of us in technical services positions.

• BEST OF JUNE (so far): NASIG 2020

There are SO many great sessions slated for NASIG 2020 (which is happening as I type this blog post)! Honestly, my excitement around this virtual conference is what spurred me to go ahead and pen this post in the hopes that more people will read this and join in the NASIG sessions still to be delivered today and that will be available as recordings following each session. New to NASIG? I am too! This is my first year attending, so here's the background: Established in 1985, NASIG (formerly the North American Serials Interest Group, Inc.) is an independent organization that promotes communication, information, and continuing education about serials, electronic resources, and the broader issues of scholarly communication. The schedule for this year literally touches on every single one of those areas, all of which fall under or intertwine with technical services positions in one way or another. 

So far the highlight from yesterday included a session on Rapid Contextual Design to create workflows between library departments that actually work. Today my favorite so far has been on the Accessibility of Repositories session. It shared excellent tips for doing accessibility audits of your site (I can see this applying to more than just repositories!) and provided resources including tools to create a guide of best practices. A major bonus for this virtual conference has been it is available in BOTH Zoom (where you can interact) and is simultaneously live streaming in YouTube (I'm looking at you fellow multi-taskers, this won't necessarily negate your other zoom meetings AND for me is keeping my computer from overloading which Zoom tends to do)! Visit the YouTube live streams and recorded sessions. You can also contribute to the discussion forum at any time during the conference, and view the schedule online for info on specific times for the remaining sessions.

Myself and two other TS-SIS members have divided up the NASIG sessions to offer more complete coverage for a future TSLL issue - so if you cannot make it to any of these sessions, fear not! Just keep an eye out for NASIG reviews in the Conference Round-Up section this fall!

• BEST OF MAY: GLA TS-IG Linked Data Workshop

This one is a bit of a shameless-self-promotion plug since I was involved in facilitating this session. However, it really was so excellent and I was amazed at the attendance from across the globe that I would regret not re-sharing the recording for those that missed it. Delivered on May 19th live with the help of Georgia Public Libraries, the presentation about linked data was the first of several forthcoming virtual workshops from my state library association's technical services interest group. The speaker Robin Fay is a Metadata and Technology Professional who has worked on metadata & digital initiatives for a variety of institutions and organizations on cataloging and institutional repository projects.

Robin answered many big picture questions surrounding linked data initiatives, like "will the promise of linked data actually save us time? How will catalogers and machines work together to streamline recording of data and authority maintenance work, allowing catalogers and metadata practitioners to focus more on data stewardship and less on being data scribes? Will Real World Objects (RWOs) and linked data help bridge the gap between traditional cataloging and the larger semantic web communities of practice, ensuring that library metadata supports our users' search behaviors, those FRBR User Tasks? Or will it just provide more maintenance work down the road?" She also shared wonderful examples (fans of Prince will LOVE this), and provided case studies and other resources. You can now watch the video recording, and Robin has made available slides and other items in a folder for anyone interested in following along.

• BEST FOR HOTTEST TOPIC: CS-SIS Controlled Digital Lending Panels

What could be more timely right now with the talk of reopening, course reserves and more in our libraries than Controlled Digital Lending (CDL)? Possibly the most controversial and therefore sexiest topic circulating our professional development lists right now is CDL. Fellow AALL members (many of which are also TS and OBS members) from the Computing Services SIS have organized two panels of experts discussing very candidly the technology side and the copyright side of CDL. Many libraries are looking into solutions for providing materials using everything from institutional-level shared folders (in either OneDrive or GSuite) to the Internet Archive's Open Library for managing, and restricting read-only time-limited access to digitized samples of varying lengths of physical holdings. This already hot topic is now literally on fire given the suit filed by multiple publishers against IA just last week. No matter which side of the fence you may be on related to CDL, one thing is certain that these sessions were very informative with engaging discussions. If you are on the fence, or just curious about what others are doing or not doing for course reserves and other high-demand items in the face of reopening this fall as a proactive measure against COVID, give both of these a listen: the Copyright Panel recording and the Technology Panel recording.

• BEST FOR EXPERIENCE: CALICon 2020

  Wow what a conference experience! Computer Assisted Legal Instruction's annual conference quickly transformed itself overnight into a completely free, fully fledged virtual schedule presented entirely in Zoom. Most sessions were live, and even those that were pre-recorded were still delivered synchronously in Zoom with engaging Q & A throughout, interesting and even hilarious chats, and a lively discussion forum for each presentation. I was highly impressed with the clusters that sessions were collected into, and the theme of the conference was even adjusted to specifically focus on pandemic situations. There was even an entire session delivered by a robotic-sounding adorable cat (Everything Important I Learned About Zoom Teaching From My Cat)! By far though the absolute best aspects of CALICon this year were the goodies box (seriously a glow in the dark yoyo, TONS of snacks, and the full create your own name-badge experience were ALL inside the box!) and the closing happy hour raffle (I didn't win anything this year - but it was still so much fun). They have really set the bar very high for all future virtual conferences, content-wise and experience-wise. As always, CALI is amazing about putting the video recordings for all sessions on YouTube following the live broadcasts, and their discussion forum is still available which includes links to slides, comments from attendees, and presentation descriptions. To get into the discussion forum topics and threads use you cali.org username and password.

• BEST ON-GOING WEBINARS: MarcEdit Multi-Part YouTube Sessions

In my last post I shared the Shelter-In-Place videos that MarcEdit developer Terry Reese has made available for free in a YouTube playlist. So far there are 8 parts split into 11 different video segments. A few are over the hour mark in length, but the content is well worth it. Terry Reese is the head of digital initiatives at the Ohio State University Libraries. Over the past seventeen years, his research interests have centered on the changing nature of library metadata and the ways in which this data can be reused and transformed in different contexts. If you're reading this and saying (like I did in the not too distant past) who is this Terry fellow and what is the big deal with MarcEdit? I encourage you to visit his webpage and discover the amazing utility that is freely available online.

Power Projects for Quarantined Librarians

Some of us are approaching the two month mark of our library's closure to the public. Though it has definitely had ups and downs, I have found it has helped me better carve out time for professional development activities, dedicate more of my day to clean-up projects I have just not had time to follow through on, and even start new projects with the help of colleagues who found themselves needing a little more to do from home. On the heels of Travis' post about transitioning technical services staff to working from home, I hope this post will elaborate on that topic to give specific project examples for those working in collection services, technical services, or metadata and archives related positions.

ILS Database Maintenance
Projects of this nature could range from starting, continuing or finishing the cleanup of small or large sets of records.

• Complete outstanding cleanup projects a for smaller sets of records. For me, a cleanup I started last fall (LL.M. Theses Collection) which I previously blogged about was the first on the chopping block.
• Facilitate the cleanup of collections, like course reserves, for other departments. Our role was simply to assist by creating lists, then formatting those in Excel. Access services staff can use that list to check for faculty members no longer with our institution, and then remove the instructor and those related reserve item records from the ILS.
• Learn more about your system and the tools you can use to better care for it. There is no shortage of webinars right now. In addition to system specific sessions, there are many free sessions focusing on record management or data tools. Some of my favorites have been Terry Reese's "MarcEdit Shelter-In-Place Webinars". The latest one, number 6, is on regular expressions.

IR Micro & Macro Clean-up
Repositories like our own in Digital Commons have issues similar to those inherent to long-standing ILS's: without regular care and feeding, the structure becomes less organized and the data for records less consistent.

• Review your repository site map and make big picture structural adjustments. Our IR has been around since 2006, and many of our earlier events (like conferences and symposium) were added before we adopted using the event types. As a result, all "events" before a certain date were actually article-type records, and all of the "events" after that certain date had completely different series structures as well as different metadata fields. To resolve this some time was spent almost manually moving the articles over, one by one, to give them the appropriate fields in their new home. It has taken lots of effort, but in the end it will make all the difference in the discoverability of events of the same series. For more info on this topic, see a previous blog post about IR Metadata.
• Harvest digital media to expand your individual item content. Similar to the LL.M. Theses collection cleanup mentioned above, last fall another colleague and I began a collaborative project to use scripts to capture all of the metadata and publicly hosted digital-born image files from our law school website into spreadsheets of data. Using these spreadsheets after a little minor formatting of the cells I can now batch load the images pretty quickly. Though this work is still in progress, it has been a perfect project for both my colleague and I to tele-work on since the repository and the website are each accessible from home.
• Learn more about your system. The BrightTalk Digital Commons sessions have been wonderful to watch both live and recorded versions of (learning more about native streaming has really come in handy!), and many of the past CALICon sessions which are all freely available as videos online have also been great sources of learning how others are using repositories and what else we can do with our own IR.

Cataloging Collections & Archives 
Be it physical items, special collections, or virtual equivalents, the building being closed has not stopped the number of items that need our attention. Even without new items, existing items can always use accessibility makeovers!

• Archive virtual events. As we all know, although some events have been cancelled completely due to closures, most have opted to go virtual in one way or another. At our law school, faculty colloquium have continued occurring in Zoom, and even a conference was hosted entirely online (with more attendance than our physical space could have accommodated). I have continued collecting materials for archiving these events both for when I return to add to the physical special collections, and to add them as I normally would to our repository "conferences" series. In the absence of printed programs, I have saved PDF "prints" of email programs, and instead of photographs of the room or panelists in real life, I have taken screen captures of Zoom rooms at the highest quality my computer will allow.

Thumbs of 15 photos of book spines for a colleague.

• Catalog items from home. I did not have too many outstanding items to catalog when I left the office to set up my home workspace. The items that I did have, I brought with me in a small box. Most ILS have a web-browser accessible entry point, and although I cannot complete all of my tasks from home (like data exchange) I can still catalog! I was able to catch up on a few items this way, and honestly spend more time doing detailed original cataloging that I might have rushed through in the office. As one of the essential employees (those physical backup tapes don't change themselves!) I have been able to grab a couple more items as needed on my brief but weekly run into the office. For those colleagues not coming into the office at all, I've taken photographs of items to share with them so they can continue their work from home, even without the items in hand.
• Make items more accessible. This could take lots of forms. One project we are excited is finally underway is the OCR-ing of hundreds of already digitized documents. The PDFs were not text-searchable, but thanks to one staff member and a couple of librarians we have created a very effective workflow and are making great progress to provide more accessibility and in turn discoverability to archival collections like student directories, law school magazines, and historical strategic plans. Transcription is another option if you have more audio or video content. It can be tedious but the effort goes a long way to making items available to a wider audience online. Marketing your collections and archives is another way to share them with the world. Blog for your library about physical items to help patrons or the public feel more at home, even from a distance. In doing so I've used it as an opportunity to get to know our archives better. Advertise your digitally available collections through organizations at the state, regional or national level. Everyone is searching for free educational content right now, so share what you have to offer. Many org's have made calls for this type of content to spotlight, and others will probably thank you for sending ideas their way. 

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro on Law School issued laptops, collection services staff could batch enhance scans and perform optical character recognition (OCR) to make PDFs text-searchable.

 
Professional Growth & Contributions
If you are still finding yourself, your colleagues or supervisee's lacking things to do, sign up for a course, attend a webcast, document your projects and turn them into articles or presentations.

• There is no end to organizations sharing webinars online right now. Even if you cannot fit all of the live events into your teleworking schedule (for some reason many of them have taken place at the same time, and in the same platforms!) you can still register for them to receive access to recording links later. In addition to the links I shared above, I've also really enjoyed the two courses I took over the last two weeks from Midwest Collaborative for Library Services. It never hurts to refresh your memory of certain topics that you might not have had dedicated attention to give since library school, or to learn something brand new! 
• Document everything. Each time I begin to make progress on a new special project, or fine tune a workflow at my institution, I approach documentation as if I were going to present it later as a conference session, workshop, or article. With many conferences announcing they are going virtual, it has never been a better time to submit proposals without the hesitation of travel logistics. If you have never published before, now may be the time to share how you did that certain something with a journal or in your organization or SIS newsletter. The opportunities are limitless, so keep that in mind no matter what projects you are undertaking. 

Transitioning Technical Services Staff to Working from Home

The sudden COVID-19 outbreak necessitated a quick transition to working from home for many institutions, including my own. With some public services, such as reference, instruction, and electronic document delivery, it's not hard to imagine how to do that work from another location. However, a lot of Technical Services work requires handling physical items. Below is brief outline of how I transitioned my Technical Services staff to working from home.

As the outbreak spread internationally, the University asked for all colleges and departments to update their Continuity of Operations Plans (COOP). Our Dean's office at the College of Law asked all supervisors to test having staff work from home to identify any technological and procedural roadblocks. In the case of my department, the staff member whose work was most suited to being done from home was the Acquisitions Specialist. I wanted that person to be the first test of working from home. Immediately, though, issues were identified. This staff person had neither hardware nor internet service at home with which she could perform her job.

On the other hand, the rest of the staff had good technological infrastructure at home but perform tasks that are less easy to transfer off-site as they handle physical materials. In their cases, I worked with them to identify projects they could work on from home. My other three direct reports came up with the following projects:

• Serials Specialist - Locating and correcting poorly formatted 852 fields and other garbled holdings information that was still outstanding from our system migration in 2018
• Cataloging Specialist - Original cataloging of theses and dissertations; focusing on re-cataloging and reclassification projects; cleaning up other data migration issues 
• Special Collections - Reorganizing photos of College events; research requests; working on publications and other professional development goals. 

The acquisitions staff person was loaned a laptop from the Public Services department. However, it needed various upgrades and administrative changes before it could function from the staff person's home. Additionally, the College purchased mobile wifi hotspots with unlimited data plans for staff to use. I was able to get one of those and set it up pretty easily. College IT staff upgraded the laptop and installed VPN software that allowed access to the University's financial systems. 

The directive to begin working from home came more quickly than anticipated. Everyone but the acquisitions staff person was able to begin working from home almost immediately, although they did make brief trips to the office to pick up items needed for their projects. The acquisitions staff person, who I had thought would be the first to begin working from home, ended up being the last one able to do so. Thankfully, it was only about a day later when all the technological issues were resolved. 

Since working from home, I check in with each of my direct reports via email at least once a day. I have asked them to send me daily summaries of their activities at the end of their work days. And I send out an all-staff message wrapping up at the end of my day. We have also transitioned our staff meeting to Zoom. At the request of our Dean, I have made these meetings weekly instead of monthly. I have also identified webinars and other activities the staff can view from home. 

Despite the sudden transition and the ever-changing situation, my Technical Services staff has adapted well to working at home. Once technological issues were addressed and projects identified, we quickly realized that Technical Services work is as adaptable to a work from home situation as other library services. 

Getting to Know TS Librarians: Becky Bearden

1. Introduce yourself (name & position). 
My name is Becky Bearden, and I am the Senior Serials & Metadata Librarian at the Fineman and Pappas Law Libraries at Boston University School of Law.

2. Does your job title actually describe what you do? Why/why not?
Overall, yes, but I think if any of us tried to squeeze most of our overarching duties into our title, they would be too long! I am responsible for all things serial-related, in both physical and electronic formats, but many of those responsibilities intersect or rely on collaboration with my colleagues, so we work closely to manage them as a team. The metadata aspect covers many things that are serial related, but this also includes a lot of monographic metadata. The term e-resource management may not be included in the title, but it is a large part of the role as well. 

3. What are you reading right now?
I have a fairly long commute, so I’ve taken up listening to lots of audiobooks on Overdrive. I have pretty eclectic tastes, so currently I have Fierce: How Competing for Myself Changed Everything by Aly Raisman with Blythe Lawrence, as well as A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin. I am also in the middle of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K Rowling at home with my older son, and enjoy a variety of Mo Willems, Bernstein Bears, and Little Critter books with my younger son!

4. If you could work in any library (either a type of library or a specific one), what would it be? Why?
I truly believe I am right where I should be. In general, serials are what I enjoy most about working in a library, and law libraries have a ton of them! Also, this position and institution are still new to me, as I joined BU this past July, and I am really enjoying learning new things, stretching my skills, and using my past experiences in my current role. 

5. You suddenly have a free day at work, what project would you work on?
I’m itching to set up prediction patterns here, since that is something I have been cheerleading since the implementation of ExLIbris’ Alma at my previous institution. This functionality was not available when BU went live in 2012, so they’ve been using the normal receiving functionality for serials receipt.

Cleaning Up Messy Records: Uncovering Match-Points in ILS and Repository Data

Many of us have our hands in multiple pots. Sometimes we are working with repository records, and other times records in our ILS. While embarking on what I mistakenly thought would be a simple series of tasks (linking from 856 fields to our freely accessible, digitized versions of the same items to our IR), I happened to uncover much messier data than expected. What a perfect opportunity to do some house-cleaning! In case you have undertaken similar work, and are considering comparing, cleaning, and (eventually) updating records in multiple locations, here are a few tips and resources I have found helpful on my own journey:

Have good list from the repository. My initial cleanup of Digital Commons items was fairly straight forward. I sat down with our International Law Librarian Anne Burnett to talk about the collection. We batch-downloaded the series as a spreadsheet, and updated the fields that did not match so that they did (example: type was not the same for each, some were articles, some dissertations - this one was easy, updated them all to be "dissertation" type). Then I saved it, and re-uploaded the batch sheet.

Have a good list from the ILS. The same set of items in our library catalog was more difficult to get a solid list of. We are in Innovative's Sierra, so I needed to use "create lists". This time sitting with Associate Director for Collection Services Wendy Moore and I generated a list of items (not bibs). We made several lists, because we quickly discovered that what we thought our control field was (the 502 note) was inconsistent. Catalogers had changed over the many years these records were created, and at a certain point the 502 had changed from having only two periods in this item's abbreviation to having three (ex. LL.M. to L.L.M.). This minor flaw made things a bit more difficult. We ended up instead using the donor note field to get closer to the ideal number of items from my repository list. In the future the location might also be a field to use for pulling this sort of list - but part of the ILS record cleanup was updating location codes, since items had recently been shifted from reserve to the basement. 

Fix your controls so they actually work. I ended up going with the list that had the highest item count (although now I had more than what was in my Digital Commons list) and updating these

records first. Now they will have consistent 502's, and correct item locations. To verify the proper 502, Wendy and I consulted our office copy of the AACR (Anglo-American Cataloging Rules) -

• "Section 2.7 B13 Dissertations". Although LL.M. was not listed as a specific example, the rule states that you use: "Thesis followed by a brief statement of the degree for which the author was a candidate (e.g.. M.A. or Ph.D.), the name of the institution..., and the year in which the degree was granted." 

To do this I used a combination of Global Update in Sierra and manual/individual edits. I added 856 fields to the records as well with subfield u (linking to the Digital Commons series landing page for this collection) and subfield 3 (for the text I wanted to appear as the hyperlink access point). You could do some of this in Rapid Update as well, if you're feeling extra confident! - Note: In Sierra I had to start with a list of item records, but at a certain point I had to re-run my partially cleaned-up list to create a new list of bib records. I could only globally update fields in the bib record with a list of bibs (a list of items would not work!). 

Export a better list from the ILS. Now that I had a proper list from Sierra, I exported it to a text delimited file, then imported it into an Excel spreadsheet. I was ready to compare it to my repository spreadsheet and figure out what what missing in Digital Commons.To figure this out, I started by doing a "save as" of each spreadsheet, then narrowing both sets of data down to only the fields that I could use to compare between the two: Title, Author, and Publication Date (year was really what I was looking for). This presented further problems - not all titles in Digital Commons looked like what should be matching titles from the ILS records (ex. many repository title fields had been entered in all caps!). For Author, Digital Commons separated last and first name fields, but in the MARC records this was a single field. For Publication, the formatted date in Digital Commons records was very detailed and specific, while the only match-point in the ILS records was the 260 field (included publication date at the end as the subfield $c) - major thanks to our Collection Services Manager David Rutland for knowing this one off the top of his head! The 502 might again prove useful if the 260's were too difficult (since the "year in which the degree was granted" appeared at the end of this field for each item).

MarcEdit, OpenRefine, and beyond. At this point in my process of this particular project I am playing around with a combination of editing in MarcEdit, as well as a number of tricks I am reading up on for OpenRefine cleanup. If you are totally new to OpenRefine, there is a really handy wiki with screencast intros that I appreciated before diving in. So far, an extremely helpful resource I have come across has been Comparing Two Sets of Data in OpenRefine How-To. This entry shares step by step how to "Normalise titles to do comparison" using three main transformations. For my particular set of data, the value.fingerprint transform has given me good results, removing case from both sets of titles:

There is also an excellent page with more information specific to working with and cleaning up dates. I am still working with the cleanup of this set of items, but even though it is a work in progress this has been a wonderful learning experience. Each time I work on it I learn something new! I am excited about the things I have figured out in this process that can be applied to other sets of items in both our repository and library catalog records in the future. I'd like to thank several of my colleagues at UGA Law Library for providing various pieces of this project's puzzle. Without them I would not have made it this far with these particular data sets. Thank you Anne, David, and Wendy for all your context, tips, tricks, and sharing your experiences with this collection.

What types of cleanup are you doing with your library's data? What tips and resources have worked well for you? Please share with us in the comments!