Marcy Strong: Alright. So Hello, everyone, and welcome to the scenic cataloging and Metadata Town Hall. Thanks for coming. I haven't had the chance to meet many of you yet. My name is Marcy Strong, and I'm the Metadata Coordinator and support specialist for Sydney Library services.
Marcy Strong: and I started this position in April
Marcy Strong: before that I worked as a metadata project librarian for the University of Rochester, but started my career at Binghamton University was catalogued.
Marcy Strong: so I spent the last few months getting to know sooni again and sooni Alma environment and thinking about how we can better support cataloging and metadata needs across soon.
Marcy Strong: So you're here today, probably because you do some cataloging work as part of your regular duties. Or maybe you're a bit of a meditated junkie, and appreciate the chance to talk and think about its use.
Marcy Strong: So I think we all know how important metadata is, and not only in our shared online environment, but in other places as well.
Marcy Strong: We know metadata helps users find what they need. But increasingly, metadata is going to be helping machines and artificial intelligence guidelines.
Marcy Strong: So many of us are probably specialists in Mark, but we also need to think about metadata in a broader sense and become specialists in metadata best practices. So today is a great opportunity to kick off some of these conversations in Zoom, and I hope that is what today can be a conversation
Marcy Strong: we will be having some presentations on the work that's going on. But I hope we can set an informal tone today, and we welcome comments and insight and questions and thoughts about what you're experiencing, and you're hearing in the cataloging and medicine.
Marcy Strong: So, please, you're welcome to speak up, whether it's by using your voice or using the chat or continuing the conversation down the road.
Marcy Strong: So I'm gonna share our agenda for the day.
Marcy Strong: Alright.
Marcy Strong: are you guys seeing an agenda?
Marcy Strong: Yes, okay. So this is what we're setting out to accomplish in our time.
Marcy Strong: We're gonna go over some of the results from the same cataloging survey that took place this fall.
Marcy Strong: We're gonna hear some updates from the United standards and how it's working group
Marcy Strong: we're gonna listen to some future plans from city library services. And then Valerie Chase, from she will be giving us some some cataloging with updates about
Marcy Strong: so any any thoughts or questions, before we jump into the cataloging survey.
Marcy Strong: and then I will close in
Marcy Strong: okay, so we did 2 different survey spot this first one is called the cataloging support from Zoom library services, and this survey went out to individuals, so went out to any staff member was invited to focus out who does cataloging and everything.
Marcy Strong: And so the objective of this
Marcy Strong: in the summer.
Marcy Strong: The objective of this one was to discover how cataloging and metadata staff feel about levels of support across. Soon a phone number.
Marcy Strong: So the survey asks about their use of sls, documentation and Sls and senior library services.
Marcy Strong: The need for nonmark metadata support and provided opportunities to express interest in participating in broader meditated conversations.
Marcy Strong: So all cataloging another staff across to me were invited to participate in the survey was open from September twentieth to November first of 2,020,
Marcy Strong: and these are some of the institutional results. There were 57 unique responses to the survey.
Marcy Strong: Some respondents chose to identify their campuses, and that data indicates responses from 27 different campuses representing university centers, university colleges, technology, colleges, and community colleges.
Marcy Strong: 20 respondents chose not to identify their campuses, and their data is not included in this portion of the analysis.
Marcy Strong: So the responses from the perspective of college sectors show that university centers were represented most highly municipal results.
Marcy Strong: and this was followed by technology, colleges, university colleges, and youth colleges.
Marcy Strong: So we ask, folks, do you use the documentation, such as the approved policy, the Faqs, the training guides that are provided by Sos. To help you with the catalogue.
Marcy Strong: and more than 80% of respondents do. They indicated that they use this documentation. however, fewer respondents reported consistently finding what they were looking for with only 58% reporting success.
Marcy Strong: So they report difficulties with intuitive navigation, consistency and page presentation and sometimes finding updated information.
Marcy Strong: The majority at 80% of respondents are aware of and using the Sls documentation. And that's great. However, while respondents know of and check the documentation, they don't always find what they're looking for, and they sometimes struggle to navigate the site and make sense of what they're reading.
Marcy Strong: So we recommend a broad documentation review looking to improve navigation, move the most pertinent information to the top of pages.
Marcy Strong: implement a review schedule and promote the documentation across Sooni. More frequently.
Marcy Strong: in the short term, we can review the resource management documentation to make sure it is current with the Alma releases.
Marcy Strong: And what can you do? So while we we try to keep the documentation updated to the latest release of Ava, we sometimes miss things.
Marcy Strong: So if you come across outdated information, please let us know
Marcy Strong: you can contact us from any Saqq page and email us at Info at Cinniola, answers.com.
Marcy Strong: and if you do, please include the name of the page and how it can be implemented.
Marcy Strong: So we're going to look at the nonmark metadata support information next, and the interest in nonmark support would be mixed
Marcy Strong: so roughly. The same amount of respondents indicated. They were unsure at 38% or didn't want support at 40%.
Marcy Strong: Only 22% answered positively.
Marcy Strong: This is likely a developing area and will continue to grow over time, even if the need isn't apparent, necessarily, and it's so bad.
Marcy Strong: However, more than half of the comments, 7 out of the 10 expressed interest for either Dublin core support or for metadata support in the environment of institutional repository.
Marcy Strong: So these comments came from respondents and all 4 sectors of the campuses, from university centers to community college.
Marcy Strong: So a local minority is looking for more double-course support.
Marcy Strong: We recommend reaching out to Sydney campuses who are already doing this work under established practices to feed and collect their guidelines on this. So speaking to the interoperable, we would like to develop guidelines for the Soar and Sdr. And other singing wide repositories
Marcy Strong: which would remain as consistent as possible with what's happening on other campuses.
Marcy Strong: We also want to research and provide more thorough support for campuses looking to import doubly poor-based metadata into the almond environment, using import profiles.
Marcy Strong: So we believe the first step in meeting our objective to provide better nonmark metadata support is to understand what is already happening on CD campuses.
Marcy Strong: If your campus has developed local policies around metadata and institutional repositories, digital asset management systems or other non helmet systems and you're willing to share them. We would love to see that.
Marcy Strong: Okay. And so 2 questions were devised to understand the interest in broader communication and peer support for the area of cataloging and metadata.
Marcy Strong: So when asked if respondents were interested in participating in conversations around metadata and seeing such as an interest group or community of practice.
Marcy Strong: 47% were on the fence with babies.
Marcy Strong: 29% answered in the affirmative, and only 24% declined outright.
Marcy Strong: A more specific question was asked about interest in joining the Smsp.
Marcy Strong: The majority at 57% declined that opportunity. But 38% showed interest with a maybe and 5% said yes.
Marcy Strong: So the data shows that more than 40 people would consider participating in a suny cataloging and metadata forum.
Marcy Strong: And this number represents the majority of respondents and supports the formation of such a group. So we're really happy to announce that we are going to be hosting a metadata interest group, and this is going to be meeting regularly.
Marcy Strong: This group will also have a base camp presence to communicate outside of meetings.
Marcy Strong: We expect this group could have broad appeal regarding the metadata topics in and out of the Alma Kunal environment. And potentially, even outside of libraries.
Marcy Strong: the Smsp will expand the group right now. The group consists of 3 suny campus members and 3 members of student library services.
Marcy Strong: We would like to broaden the booth and have reached out to those who expressed interest in joining the Smsp. Which we hope will achieve a more balanced group with representation across the different campus types.
Marcy Strong: So stay tuned.
Marcy Strong: Leslie will be joining us shortly to talk about the updates for the new and the improved Smsp. And we'll also have details in a few minutes, and how you can become involved in the senior Metadiva and Krishna.
Marcy Strong: So any questions or thoughts about that.
Marcy Strong: It's fine.
Marcy Strong: Come in via Chant Marcy. So
Marcy Strong: oh, sorry chat. So you're all caught up there. Okay, alright, thanks.
Marcy Strong: alright. Well, we have. If that wasn't enough, survey information, we have more. Let me bring up the second one
Marcy Strong: alright. So second cataloging survey. So this one is called the state of cataloging and meditative services at Sydney Campuses.
Marcy Strong: This survey was targeted the first survey went out to anyone interested who does metadata work, and this survey was had a different intention. It was intended to be a bit more of a snapshot of what's happening at campuses
Marcy Strong: kind of more demographic in nature.
Marcy Strong: So this went out to library directors, the different campuses.
Marcy Strong: So this survey, like the other, was conducted by the Sunni metadata standards and policies, working group and sls, and was presented on September twentieth, and remained open until December 30 first.
Marcy Strong: and it was distributed to all the super library directors.
Marcy Strong: And this was our objective was basically to learn more about the cataloging activities happening at various Sunni campuses and how sls can better support the campuses and achieving their goals
Marcy Strong: and by cataloging activities we define them as activities that result in metadata creation, maintenance, and ingest around the Alma environment.
Marcy Strong: Here's kind of an overview of the results. So
Marcy Strong: the campus is the answer. I organize them into the different campus types. Which is that that first column you see here, and I'll just process that by saying I defined the campus types and sooni defined the campus types. If you go to the Soony website, this is how they got the different campuses organized. So
Marcy Strong: so we've got the University Center Slash doctoral degree granting institutions for which there are 10 campuses, university colleges, 13 technology colleges, of which there are 7, and community colleges. There are 30.
Marcy Strong: So of the 60 campuses that we solicited. 23 entered the survey for an overall sunny response rate of 38%. So it's a pretty good response rate.
Marcy Strong: The highest overall response rate came from the community colleges at 30%, followed closely by both university colleges and technology colleges is one to 6%.
Marcy Strong: Whoever technology colleges were the best representative of their type, with nearly every campus responding at 86%.
Marcy Strong: And this was followed by university colleges in nearly half
Marcy Strong: university centers, slash Dacco, regranting institutions at 40%, and community colleges with almost a quarter of those campuses responding.
Marcy Strong: So this survey breaks out into a couple of different chunks, and for the next few slides. We're going to be looking at questions around staff working on cataloging staff.
Marcy Strong: So we asked how many staff members on your campus work on cataloging tasks. and the majority of campuses around 68% reported 3 or fewer staff members working and cataloging tasks.
Marcy Strong: So at the extremes, 9% of campuses have either 7 or 8 staff members, and 14% of campuses have only a single person dedicated to doing cataloging that.
Marcy Strong: And we can further break this down by campus type.
Marcy Strong: So university centers have the most staff with cataloging responsibilities at an average of around 6.
Marcy Strong: And this is followed by university colleges and community college 3 and a technology colleges at 2.5.
Marcy Strong: And now we asked, well, what exactly are you guys doing? What are the cataloging tasks, and everybody is happy. Paddle on the books. So 100% of campus is responding. Our copycat 11 books.
Marcy Strong: almost as many are doing collection management tasks, such as relinking or withdrawing, 91% and 83 are also doing copy cataloging with special formats such as videos and sound recordings.
Marcy Strong: 61% of your call numbers
Marcy Strong: and all of the original cataloging comes in at around 57%. So just over half of the campuses responding are doing original cataloging the special formats and original cataloging of books.
Marcy Strong: And then down at the bottom, we've got the the metadata creation. So the metadata creation for electronic resources which we're thinking of is mark based that comes in around 43.
Marcy Strong: And at the very bottom is the metadata patient for digital resources, the amount of our stuff. And that's coming in currently around 30%.
Marcy Strong: So who is doing original cataloging? How does original cataloging look for processing campuses? The 75% of the doctoral schools are doing their own original cataloging with one campus. Currently outsourcing
Marcy Strong: university colleges also spend quite a bit of their time in a digital cataloging task.
Marcy Strong: Technical colleges and community colleges are doing more copy and less original with technical schools and technology schools, doing more original cataloging of books and community colleges, doing more original cataloging of special formats.
Marcy Strong: So what else are our folks doing? So this question got at everyone who's working on cataloging tasks. What do they do in addition.
Marcy Strong: And in addition, acquisitions came in at the top. So 83 of staff members who work in cataloging tasks are also working on acquisitions.
Marcy Strong: 65% are also working on collection development. 61% on electronic resources
Marcy Strong: and just over half are working on reference and instruction tasks.
Marcy Strong: And then down at the bottom, 35% are doing administration and management kind of work as well as repository and digital services.
Marcy Strong: And then at the very bottom, just over a quarter of staff members working in cataloging tasks. Also these systems. And it user.
Marcy Strong: you can see, there's also a 35% for other
Marcy Strong: and other included such things as storage facility, management.
Marcy Strong: government documents, interlibrary loan and resource, sharing circulation and special collections.
Marcy Strong: And now we're gonna look at some local catalog and practices.
Marcy Strong: So we asked, which of these tools and processes do you use to access new mark records
Marcy Strong: and unsurprisingly, most campuses report using Oclc tools to access mark records with connection client being the most popular at 74. So this is followed by the connection browser at 26% and world share record manager at 22%.
Marcy Strong: One quarter of campuses also reported relying on vendor loads for their own. And just 3 campuses use data imports from external repositories.
Marcy Strong: So what classification schemes do you use? And 91% of city campuses use the Library of Congress?
Marcy Strong: However, either in addition to or in blue of our local schemes. At 22%, 13% of campuses use the duty decimal system.
Marcy Strong: 9% use Sudoc and 4% for one campus is using the National Library of Medicine.
Marcy Strong: And then we ask you, use the acquisitions module, and the majority of responding campuses do at 78%
Marcy Strong: of the campuses that are not using it. Only one campus is interested in implementing it in the future.
Marcy Strong: So the percentage of campus is using the acquisitions module and 78%
Marcy Strong: is pretty close to the percentage of staff that perform both cataloging and acquisition staff at 83.
Marcy Strong: Okay. so now, onto changes in cataloging and metadata.
Marcy Strong: So we asked we asked everyone these questions, and we ask them to think about it
Marcy Strong: 5 years in the past, and then anticipate it. 5 years in the future. So, for example.
Marcy Strong: 5 years in the past, have you reported fewer cataloging staff? And do you anticipate having fewer cataloging staff 5 years in the future. So that's kind of how to read this chart.
Marcy Strong: The majority of campuses have seen a decrease in cataloging staff in the past.
Marcy Strong: and a quarter of them expect that to continue into the future.
Marcy Strong: Only 9% of campuses are expecting additional lines dedicated to this work.
Marcy Strong: Nearly all campuses report a reduction in physical materials to catalog.
Marcy Strong: and most expect that trend to continue with more electronic resources. Taking up their time.
Marcy Strong: Nearly half of campuses are expecting more work in nonmark cataloging for digital resources, which is more than 20% higher than the theme in the past.
Marcy Strong: So that's the one at the bottom there more method for digital resources in the past. Only 22% of respondents reported this, but 45 expect to see this work in the next 5 years.
Marcy Strong: and then looking into that one a little bit further.
Marcy Strong: so nonmark metadata work is often thought of as cataloging and institutional repositories, data, repositories, archival management systems, digital exhibit tools and other non home systems.
Marcy Strong: So almost half of campuses reported that they expected nonmark metadata work to grow.
Marcy Strong: The 75% of the university centers, and 67% of university colleges are expecting this growth.
Marcy Strong: Almost half of community colleges at 43% are preparing for it. But none of the technology packages reported this as an expectation for them
Marcy Strong: alright and then collaborations.
Marcy Strong: So we asked if sunny campuses were part of the Pcc. Or the program for cooperative catalog.
Marcy Strong: And if you're unfamiliar with this program, it's administered through the Library of Congress and it's responsible for a lot of the authority work that happens.
Marcy Strong: And this usually takes kind of a big institutional commitment to be a Pcc. Member. So
Marcy Strong: so we asked if their campus was a part of the Pcc. 61% said, No. 30 did not know, and 2 respondents said, Yes, so here are our Seni. Pcc. Members
Marcy Strong: Binghamton and Buffalo are both members of Nico, which is named authorities being intended. Buffalo are both members of Big Go for pretty big records, and then buffalo is also a concert member for records.
Marcy Strong: And then we asked respondents if they were interested in additional cataloging support from Suny library services and 35% said, maybe 30% said no.
Marcy Strong: 26% said other. And these were typically campuses that already have extended support contracts. And 9% said, yes.
Marcy Strong: So 10 campuses, or about 44% of the respondents indicated an interest in learning more about catalog and support from student library services.
Marcy Strong: So this is a work file that was generated out of a bunch of comments that we got, and I'll let you just kind of look at that for a minute.
Marcy Strong: Oh, so we received numerous comments to the question, do you have any concerns about how cataloging is? Manage at your campus? You feel that you have enough staff to manage the work.
Marcy Strong: and many people stated concerns about upcoming retirements.
Marcy Strong: about the ability to fill those positions and then staffing issues in general.
Marcy Strong: So these were just a few of of the overall thoughts I had, and and kind of pulling this together.
Marcy Strong: There are fewer suny cataloggers now than in the past, and while this trend will slow, it looks like it will continue.
Marcy Strong: There's widespread concerns about retirement and staffing, and that came out, and and several of the questions, you know, with people being concerned about
Marcy Strong: being able to keep the line when someone retires, and then, even if they can keep the line, if the line will be repurposed into a different kind of of job function.
Marcy Strong: There is a continued shift for supporting electronic resources over physical collections, but that difference seems to be slowing.
Marcy Strong: There's an expected growth in Nonmark metadata and need for metadata support and systems other than Alma and female.
Marcy Strong: and there seems to be a strong overlap between cataloging and acquisitions. Tabs.
Marcy Strong: So those were some of the things that jumped out at me. And
Marcy Strong: I would love to hear what jumped out at you, or you know what you're experiencing at your campus.
Susan Perry (OLIS): I have a question for the group.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And just to get, you know thoughts out. But when Marcy was showing the slide that said, You know, what else do you do besides cataloging? You know I saw that reference and instruction was, you know, 50. So when I was at a campus, you know every but every librarian, no matter what department, had to do with reference, not instruction but reference. And I was always jealous of campuses. That kind of you know, said what tech services librarians don't have to do reference.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And I just wondered. You know. Sometimes it strengthens your skills when you spend a lot of time looking at the discovery later. And sometimes it's just
Susan Perry (OLIS): it's hard to shift gears like that all the time. So I just wondered if anyone had any thoughts on that.
Susan Perry (OLIS): You know.
April Davies (Cobleskill): I'm not used to you guys being this quiet. Thank you. April, go for it.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So this is April at global scale. And I do do reference, and occasionally instruction. I try not to do instruction if I can help it. It's really not my forte to prepare lessons.
April Davies (Cobleskill): Yeah. But II agree with what you said earlier in that reference, I think, makes me a better cataloger.
April Davies (Cobleskill): It also helps with my acquisitions, work, my collection development, and all that other stuff.
April Davies (Cobleskill): even my administrative work, because I have a broader
April Davies (Cobleskill): view of what's going on than I would if I was just in my office all the time.
Kimberly Weston: I agree this is Kimberly in Rockland.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Umhm. So say more about that Kimberly.
Kimberly Weston: You know. We're we're leaning mean here. So I'm the last tenured librarian CC. And Sarah have retired. But we have Claire who's in her fourth, fifth year of reappointment.
Kimberly Weston: and we have a a temporary library, but we have to do everything, because it's just the 3 of us, and we have a
Kimberly Weston: series of adjuncts. But I don't know if they're going to be adding any more full time lines any soon, anytime. Soon
Kimberly Weston: we do. We do. Yeah, we have several. But
Kimberly Weston: you know, it's it's it's nice to have the continuity of a full time person. But you know we you have to do what you have to do.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And then in the chair, April Earl said, that working in rough instruction is important and keeping in touch with the student body and their needs.
Susan Perry (OLIS): and Susan Davis says, No, in person staffing of a reference desk at U be, that's interesting. Some tech services folks assist with chat reference
Susan Perry (OLIS): eresources is in tech services and handles a lot of troubleshooting.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So yeah, those are great comments. Thanks.
Susan Perry (OLIS): The other thing that I would that I noted about working at the reference desk was that
Susan Perry (OLIS): Our campus had combined circulation and ref which was like the best thing ever. So we had one long desk.
Susan Perry (OLIS): and we have a lot of interaction with like with the student workers, and it was kind of a great way to mentor them, and maybe talk some of them into pursuing them their MOS, and maybe go on to grad school and librarianship. So if you're lucky enough to have student workers.
Susan Perry (OLIS): and most of them end up in circulation, you know it's great when they can kind of see another side of the library, too. So.
Susan Perry (OLIS): and I love students. I loved working with students.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): But II wanted they. They are incredible. And I, wanna mention something that you were talking about thinking.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): you know, as as people retire. And you know there's not as many newer people in our in our specific field for cataloging, right? And it really does require a lot of mentorship. It requires a lot of it's almost like a
Maureen Clements (SUNY): a guilt, like, you know, I don't even know how you would describe it, but you know, it really just requires a lot of learning and a couple of years of really
Maureen Clements (SUNY): understanding how to do the job. So that's another thing that I do tend to worry about a little bit. If you're a new cataloger coming onto a campus and the cat. The previous cataloger may have retired.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): issues like that. How do we support people? New work flows.
Leslie Feldballe: It's very hard to even find a library full program that teaches like cataloging in the traditional sense anymore.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Yep.
Susan Perry (OLIS): well, any part of that is good, because it's not totally mark focused, you know, I mean, so that that's part of it, you know. I mean, I mean, that's what you spend your time. That's what I spent my time doing with working in mark so
Maureen Clements (SUNY): and and 2 sometimes is. The other thing, too, is either with there's so many, there's so fewer people actually doing the job. And if you have many different roles at your job, you have less time to concentrate on cataloging or learn it. Learn. Really, you know, the nuanced aspects of it, cause you're just trying to slap in a record and then serve a patron. And then, you know, so there's a lot of that type of stuff, I think, happens
Maureen Clements (SUNY): 2.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Oh, Angela has a comment. I'm I'm gonna read for the recording.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Angela says, like Kimberly, we are also lean and lean at Morrisville. We only have 5 full time people. Every person in the library is handling multiple jobs.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Every time anyone that worked in cataloging retired it was dropped on the remaining people
Susan Perry (OLIS): rather than filling the line. Yup! Exactly, thanks, Angela.
Marcy Strong: Job creep. You know that. Well.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): And so with that thinking about Job creep right thinking about that. How do we support each other in these in these roles? Right? Because we have such a wonderfully huge group of people to help. So
Maureen Clements (SUNY): you're not alone.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): I'll speak. I'll speak up because this is a Olis Sls type thing, and
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): I've missed a few. So I have to share a couple thoughts, even though I don't do cataloging as such.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): But again, sort of seeing the landscape, I mean, what's the
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): attitude or view of cataloging on campuses in terms of
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): you know, management support. Is it valued as an activity, do people think? Oh, yeah. Now we have the network zone and the community zone, and we don't need cataloging of any kind. You know, electronic stuff is just chaos, anyway. So I was just wondering that wasn't part of the the survey questions. Because again, the the value, you know, it's always like
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): it takes too much, you know, like human power. It's.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): you know, for these nerdy types, and I don't mean to insult anyone. But you know you get those attitudes about. You know you speak this other language. You're arguing over a period, or a colon, or something like that. And a lot of it's true also on that E resources side is that there's a lot involved, and I know that there are new resources, people who are the same thing like, how are we gonna learn this? If there aren't people with experience out there because it's not.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): It's it's not just, you know. Anybody can walk in and pick this, pick this up. And so again, like the the cataloging. You know you have a difficult
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): job in the sense of trying to go by the you know the rules of the road, so to speak, but also, what are the patrons you know, looking for? And you know how much
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): customization, you know, adding added entries or other things to help. you know, to help patrons find things. And then there's gonna be. There's gonna be a lot of other places to to sort of apply
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): the organization and classification if you will, in the broadest sense. I don't know that every campus is gonna have this but data repositories for faculty research.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): It's gonna be huge, huge, huge, and I think the fact that they're they're looking for somebody like to help them organize it and again identify it. Help other people find it. That's that's a whole new area. And people could get really excited about that. And again on your campus. It could really add value to what the library services are, and I granted it might not be across all library types and sooni. But
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): you know, and some of it is is right, is what's the value is is cataloging, and that sort of description, organization, etc., is that is that highly valued? I know we lived through some years here at Ub. Where it wasn't.
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): and we saw again the drastic reduction in staff. It's different now, and so we have maybe more people than we have in long time. Right? Leslie Brian. I mean, it's like there's more than one person or 2 people. It's
Susan Davis Bartl (UB): wow.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So II have another point that that, Michael added to the chat. And this is interesting, too. You know, not to stop the flow of conversation, but I wanna capture these. Michael says, has anyone had the opposite concern where you have? People have worked in cataloging, and because of reduced physical purchasing or admin focusing on other priorities that catalogers need to be moved to other types of work.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So that's a counterpoint.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And then Lisa says that
Susan Perry (OLIS): I think more cataloging and metadata events and programs would be instrumental in supporting catalogers. We need a community that we can rely on for updates, training
Susan Perry (OLIS): questions and collaboration.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And I'll just keep going. Nicholas says also events that are beginner, friendly or specifically for those Mentees that we are teaching and trying to raise up Yup succession planning Yup.
Susan Perry (OLIS): always a goal hardly ever planned for.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And then Lisa asks, can we get a session for catalogers at the next conference next Sunilah Conference? And
Susan Perry (OLIS): I can. I can address that, but I won't do it right here. And then, as Susan says, Alma, clean up is a forever job.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Yeah. So those are all those are all great thoughts. David, go ahead.
David Floyd (he/him): So just responding to the general idea of like valuing cataloging. I'm David Floyd. I'm at Binghamton University.
David Floyd (he/him): I have observed, I'm still relatively early in my career. But it was. There's this problem about
David Floyd (he/him): visual recognition of what cataloging does. It's a lot like asking somebody if you're trying to evaluate catalogings impact. It's a lot like asking somebody to judge the quality of a website by looking at the HTML code
David Floyd (he/him): where yes, somebody who's well versed in web design could probably give you a pretty good estimation, but it would make more sense to just see whether or not, you can use the website.
David Floyd (he/him): And I think connecting
David Floyd (he/him): the role of cataloging to the usability of your discovery layer to the discoverability of your resources to the ability to find that thing. You didn't know you were looking for the idea. Like, you know, serendipitous discovery as a concept exists because of the way that cataloging impacts search outcomes. And I think.
David Floyd (he/him): tying that together, the the cataloging and discovery
David Floyd (he/him): cataloging for discovery, understanding the catalogers have a role to play in making decisions about the customization of your discovery. Layer
David Floyd (he/him): that
David Floyd (he/him): whole ecosystem of
David Floyd (he/him): providing the metadata is essential to the ability of your discovery layer to function. I think one thing that we take for granted, for people who aren't in the position to
David Floyd (he/him): look at the HTML and know the difference between vendor records and
David Floyd (he/him): locally created records is
David Floyd (he/him): the reason why the look the vendor records don't always work is that they are not created in the context of your catalog.
David Floyd (he/him): and the idea that creating metadata in the context of the metadata you already have is part of what makes catalogs work.
David Floyd (he/him): You don't have that option when you're trying to get an ebook package of 10,000 items, though you know nobody has the time to do. Well, let me just let me just adjust these 10,000 records. So there's an inevitable push and pull.
Susan Perry (OLIS): You also point to the fact that we get siloed. I mean, we have our, you know we we break up. Oh, this is the discovery team. This is the cataloging team. This is the metadata team. You know. We're not always. You know, everything we're doing in. Alma isn't always
Susan Perry (OLIS): able to be displayed in primo, or you know, I mean it. Yeah. But but you're right. We need more of a 360, you know, and and we've been seeing this for years, you know, to get out of our silos. But I think as discovery layers take as discovery systems like primo takeover. You know those they have to come down. Just have to come down April. Go ahead.
April Davies (Cobleskill): I remember to unmute myself. Several people have remarked on, you know, if we're doing our job they don't realize it.
April Davies (Cobleskill): and it's like that with pretty much a lot of things libraries do. If the databases are working the way they're supposed to, nobody notices them. They just take them for granted. And in a way it's nice, and in a way it's not I mean.
April Davies (Cobleskill): one of the things that happened my first year at Cobblestill was student came to me looking for a copy of Othello.
April Davies (Cobleskill): and I'm like, of course, we're going to have a fellow world library.
April Davies (Cobleskill): and according to our catalog, we didn't. But we did, because we had 2 complete sets of Shakespeare's works. But there were no contents, notes. and so it's really when we don't
April Davies (Cobleskill): do our job, or when there's something in the system that's not what we need it to do, that you realize that. Yes, this makes a difference.
April Davies (Cobleskill): We have. We have a particular series from the International Plant Propagator Society that we get that is extremely popular with our students. Surprise surprise. We're an Ag school
April Davies (Cobleskill): but the reason that they like it even more is, several years ago we decided that we would do full contents, notes on them because these are conference proceedings, and knowing that there's something on
April Davies (Cobleskill): different, I like sitting here going, missed propagation of peonies.
April Davies (Cobleskill): or whatever makes a difference, and being able to navigate the multi volume set and say, I want the one from 2,006
April Davies (Cobleskill): and and get to that. It. It makes a difference for people. Now, are there other ways we could accomplish that.
April Davies (Cobleskill): Perhaps with technology, we could get to a point where we don't need to enter them ourselves. But we're not there yet. And in the meantime that value added.
April Davies (Cobleskill): I think, makes a difference, and
April Davies (Cobleskill): being able to document the value added, how many times have I had to fix OC. Lc. Records, or add call numbers, or whatever else that wasn't there or was wrong.
April Davies (Cobleskill): and keeping track of that, and saying the reason everything works so well is because I did. This. I found, has been helpful for me.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Yes, adding, Lc, call numbers to records with Justin Dewey is
Susan Perry (OLIS): is a very common job of ours. So
Susan Perry (OLIS): oh, I'm I was reading Jill's Jill's chat. The Provost is looking for Jill Kehoe, and found her putting mylar and dust jackets, and with dumbfounded the books don't come shelf ready. No one thinks about the work. It takes to get a book in the catalog and onto the shop.
And David says, when we make those investments as if I was discussing an environment like connection.
Susan Perry (OLIS): the benefits are shared globally in World Cat. Exactly. Exactly.
Susan Perry (OLIS): And conference publications are is, some is a library that doesn't have inter library loan along with with tech services. Yeah. Conference publications are
Susan Perry (OLIS): fun fun times. So.
Marcy Strong: Marci, are you gonna cut us off when it's time to? We're just about there. I don't. Wanna I don't. Wanna
Marcy Strong: so now you want the opportunity to speak, though, and I just what Susan kind of mentioned, too, about thinking about the skills the catalogers bring to their work. And while
Marcy Strong: you know what we do, day to day may may change a little bit, we may not be doing as much. Mark based physical cataloging.
Marcy Strong: thinking about the work that we do and the need for things like authority control. You know. If you've used chat Gpt, you know there is still a long way for AI to go to be able to provide the sort of you know the discovery and the answers that people are looking for. And you know, there still needs to be a tremendous amount of behind the scenes work by people with information organization skills, the kind of skills that we all have.
Marcy Strong: So I think you know, we still continue to do the work that we're doing. But we have to think about, yeah, what are the next steps? Where are the next systems that we're going. What are the sort of bigger picture skills that we can bring to it? So it's not just Mark, but it's just sort of encoding information. It's thinking about the kind of discoverability. So
Marcy Strong: we're, we're also very, very necessary.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So I just want to circle back on the note about the Sunni Law Conference. Marcy, just give me 1 s. So I'm on the programming committee. So we'll I'll be on the committee that reviews the programming presentations.
Susan Perry (OLIS): presentation proposals. And what I learned is that if we if we want to set up a sig, you know any kind of special interest group at the conference. We just have to email the the conference chair. That we want to be put somewhere on the schedule. So I'm happy to do that, you know. If there's enough interest. I can ask them to set up a metadata meeting time.
so
Susan Perry (OLIS): I will take care of that.
April Davies (Cobleskill): This is April cobbleskill. Again, I just wanna chime in that. The only way to get cataloging presentations on the schedule is to submit cataloging presentations. Several years ago I was despairing of the fact that there were no cataloging or even text services things at the Sunni Lock Conference, so I sent out a note saying, Hey, somebody needs to do something, and someone said to me, Well, so do it.
April Davies (Cobleskill): And at first I was like, no, no, I can't do that. And then it's like, Okay, fine. I'll do it.
April Davies (Cobleskill): But it's doing that stuff and encouraging people to do that stuff
April Davies (Cobleskill): that makes it happen. There's always going to be reference stuff at the conference. There's always going to be instruction stuff at the conference.
April Davies (Cobleskill): getting stuff on anything that we do takes effort by us, and
April Davies (Cobleskill): there aren't very many of us at our campuses, and sometimes we say, Well, I don't have the time for that. I don't even have time to go to the conference, even if there was a cataloging session. Well.
April Davies (Cobleskill): yet to challenge sometimes. But we're the only ones who can make it happen.
Susan Perry (OLIS): and you don't have to do one yourself. I mean, you can put together a panel, you know, and and have a a couple of people that are willing to speak. You know a small part of the and I will say, back in the day when I first joined Suny, April was one of those people that send to me. You gotta present. Just talk about cataloging and
Susan Perry (OLIS): and I listen to her. I think we did a presentation together. But also you can recruit several years ago, when Rda was still coming down the pike, and everyone was, you know, nervous and whatnot
April Davies (Cobleskill): II went out and recruit. It's like, I don't know enough about Rda. So I went and found somebody and said, Please, will you come to our conference and present. And she did, and it was very well attended and very well received. So if there is something that you don't have the expertise on that. You wanna learn about
April Davies (Cobleskill): find somebody, and maybe we can get them to present, and maybe depending on what it is. Perhaps even Sunni law could, you know. Give them, you know. Give them free.
April Davies (Cobleskill): attendance regardless. But they would, you know, perhaps even do a small honorarium or something, if that was necessary, and if it was a big enough deal.
April Davies (Cobleskill): but it's something to think about. And you you don't know until you ask
Marcy Strong: thanks for that. April. Okay, we're gonna put a little pause in this conversation and then switch over to Leslie, who is going to give us an update on the SMS key?
Marcy Strong: Are you able to share other.
Leslie Feldballe: I'm trying to figure that out right now. Alright, let me see. Can you see my Powerpoint? Alright.
Leslie Feldballe: Okay. So I'll try to be quick. Give a quick update on Smsp. My name is Leslie Feldball. I'm cataloging and Metadata librarian at the University of Buffalo.
Leslie Feldballe: and I am
Leslie Feldballe: the chair of Sm, although Marcy's really been holding on the fort and Maureen because I was out a lot of this year because I had a baby, so I have to thank Marcy and Maureen for keeping, and everybody who's been on David Maria Plananski, everybody who's been keeping Susan, who's been keeping the momentum going.
Leslie Feldballe: So I really appreciate it.
Leslie Feldballe: let's see. Okay. So the Sunni metadata standards and policy working group, Smsp, we've had a rotating test of cataloggers in the Smsp. Pretty much since the group's inception, which was.
Leslie Feldballe: you know, predates Almas. Go live by a few years. We've largely been print cataloggers working with mark bibliographic data.
Leslie Feldballe: And our charge is here on the screen. With Kellogg's community input and Olis assistance, we develop and maintain standard system wide policies, best practices, workflows, configurations, and projects for metadata practices within the Suny Alma library services platform.
Leslie Feldballe: We work in consultation with other Sunni working groups and back when we were implementing Alma. There were several more than there are now
Leslie Feldballe: and then. We review needs options and opportunities for cataloging and metadata training within suny and recommend training and documentation plans to Olis. So
Leslie Feldballe: can I advance my slide? Okay? So, as Marcy mentioned in her presentations about the surveys, we reached out for new members. And we
Leslie Feldballe: we got some, which is really nice, because we've been historically kind of a small group with a heavy emphasis on university centers. So.
Leslie Feldballe: this is a list of the current membership, and I'd like to welcome our newest members, which are Barb, Catherine, Joan Wendy, and Jill, and then also to welcome back Megan, who was on the group a few years ago and has
Leslie Feldballe: return to us. So we've we've grown in size. We've got more representation from
Leslie Feldballe: and community colleges which we've always really struggled to get, because we know that you're very stretch very thin at community colleges, and you're often very small team who doesn't necessarily have the bandwidth to participate in a group like ours. But we're really really grateful for the insight that, having members from all different types of institutions can give us into.
Leslie Feldballe: You know, the cataloging landscape?
Leslie Feldballe: Here at Suny.
Leslie Feldballe: So just a brief overview of our group. If you're new to the cataloging at Suny. If you're new to Suny, or maybe you just. You know
Leslie Feldballe: we've been around for a while, but I don't know how how much
Leslie Feldballe: how public we are. Really, I really don't have a sense of that. I I've been very involved for a long time, but you know it really depends on each
Leslie Feldballe: institution and how you structure your workflows, and how much time you have to dig into these things. So we were created as a group by the Sunni Council of Library Directors, and Olis back in 2,016, as part of the
Leslie Feldballe: initial phases of the migration from Alice
Leslie Feldballe: to Alma, and we were charged with exploring new integrated library systems and projects, and I was not on the group at this point. This predates me. And the goal was to transition all 64 campuses to one product, and that just seemed so far-fetched at the time. It was almost like, How are we Gonna do this. Where is the light at the end of the tunnel?
Leslie Feldballe: I wasn't on Smsd. But I was. I was here at Suny, just wondering how this was all going to happen. And so, once Alma and Primo were chosen, the Smsp. Turned.
Leslie Feldballe: It's attention to determining how to successfully migrate the data from each campus into one system.
Leslie Feldballe: and right around the time that we went live with Alma I joined this group and that was in the summer of 2,019. And then we really focused on data cleanup. As Susan Davis mentioned, it's a never ending
Leslie Feldballe: the cleanup in Alma. But we focused on it, initially testing new features in Alma and then working out inconsistencies and problems across the consortium.
Leslie Feldballe: We also created
Leslie Feldballe: standardized cataloging and metadata practices for consistency. And these are the Msps that you can find on the Sls Lib Guide, and
Leslie Feldballe: our focus continues to be to
Leslie Feldballe: develop and maintain standards. system-wide policies. best practices workflows
Leslie Feldballe: just to ensure continuity among metadata practices within the suny libraries consortium.
Leslie Feldballe: And we've made an ongoing effort to communicate with cataloging leads at each institution. And this has been historically pretty challenging. And so this is why Marcy, getting the the results
Leslie Feldballe: that she did with our surveys. Was pretty pretty incredible for us that
Leslie Feldballe: we got so much participation in these surveys. It really provided us an opportunity to get get a fuller understanding of the cataloging landscape fuller than we've had since before Alma.
Leslie Feldballe: this need to keep in touch is something that we try to do on an ongoing basis, because obviously, staffing changes make this something that we need to revisit regularly.
Leslie Feldballe: And we've also made an in we've made.
Leslie Feldballe: We've tried to reach out to institutions for other reasons as well. We've we've been curious in the past. If we could connect
Leslie Feldballe: people who can catalog state in different languages or in different specific formats
Leslie Feldballe: to try and put that information in a a single place in case somebody needs somebody who can read a Turkish title page verto, or something like that
Leslie Feldballe: that can be really helpful when you need it. I know I've reached out to David for my with my Hebrew questions in the past
Leslie Feldballe: and so hopefully, this kind of these kinds of conversations will continue as we build an interest group which
Leslie Feldballe: we'll continue to talk about.
Leslie Feldballe: So additionally, we we work to stay up to date with any changes to Alma that might affect cataloging and metadata workflows and
Leslie Feldballe: over the past few years these have been things like the the rollout of the new metadata editor in Alma
Leslie Feldballe: metador. If people remember metador we we were very interested in how that was gonna play out. It was
Leslie Feldballe: for those who missed the metador phase of clarivate. Next librous. It was their open metadata platform which was ultimately killed by a lawsuit from Oclc. But there was a lot of conversation around
Leslie Feldballe: the continuing conversation around. Who owns the metadata that we create and contribute. And there is a lot of questions to what Sunni's role would be within that landscape if metador did get off the ground.
Leslie Feldballe: We want to stay abreast of linked data initiatives.
Leslie Feldballe: interactions with Oclc, and you know any other. You know, system interactions that might come up
Leslie Feldballe: in 2020 reparative cataloging became a significant project for our group.
Leslie Feldballe: and to this end we began investigating trends in addressing harmful language in Library of Congress, subject headings. and this work is still ongoing.
Leslie Feldballe: We welcome diverse perspectives as we look ahead to more reparative cataloging work in the future and in my slides, which I will make sure I share. I do have a link to our change to subject Lib Guide. That shows the work that we did in this area.
Leslie Feldballe: Nico. Then there's been interest from catalogers across duty, libraries in participating in the Library of Congress, name authority, cooperative program, or Nico.
Leslie Feldballe: Through this program
Leslie Feldballe: participants can contribute authority records for agents, places, works, and expressions to the Naca authority file.
Leslie Feldballe: and there used to be a quota for Nico. You had to be a participating institution and meet your quota of Nico records. You've gotten rid of that. The Library of Congress has gotten rid of that. So
Leslie Feldballe: they're really just happy to have people participating in the program
Leslie Feldballe: and membership in Nico is open to individual institutions willing to support their staff through the Nico training process. And it's a it's somewhat of an onerous process. It's it's now. It's, I believe, a self guided training.
Leslie Feldballe: But I did it at the beginning of the pandemic, and it took a month, and then my NATO records were under review for a few more months after that. So it's it's definitely a time commitment. But there's a lot of interest in it.
Leslie Feldballe: And we've had interest
Leslie Feldballe: in a Naco funnel for Suny and a Naco funnel is really just a group of libraries that have joined together to contribute Nico records.
Leslie Feldballe: And funnel numbers can create records where individually they'd be in modest numbers.
Leslie Feldballe: but they can consolidate their efforts and make a more significant contribution in terms of the quantity of the the records that they're contributing.
Leslie Feldballe: And so if you're interested in learning more about Nico training or learning participating in a Nico funnel like, please reach out. We can provide information. This is an ongoing conversation that we're having for how we can support that and
Leslie Feldballe: make that happen in the future.
Leslie Feldballe: Me advance my slides here oops ahead of myself.
Leslie Feldballe: So, looking ahead.
Leslie Feldballe: if any of this sounds interesting. Please consider joining our interest group. So this is like
Leslie Feldballe: less of a commitment than joining Smsp, which we'd also welcome you to the group as well, but the interest group.
Leslie Feldballe: maybe, can be a place where, if you can't drop in every month, you can come when you have a question. We have an instance of base camp. You can post your questions in basecamp. We can answer it
Leslie Feldballe: or we can discuss it. If we don't have an answer, we can
Leslie Feldballe: try to pool our collective hive mind and direct use of the resources that can help
Leslie Feldballe: our goals for 2024 really include looking beyond mark connecting with librarians who work with other types of metadata, Dublin core managing, institutional repositories, archives. We want to broaden the conversation, and we know that there's interest in crosswalking a lot of this metadata. So
Leslie Feldballe: we want to. We want to grow in that area. And we're hoping that the interest group can allow us to do that.
Leslie Feldballe: We also have an ongoing goal to clean up some of the Msps. The the approved policies that we've had in place since we migrated to Alma. We want to make them more easily navigable. We want to add new ones or archive obsolete ones and just make it a little bit more user friendly to scroll through them
Leslie Feldballe: on the libguide and then again, we want to continue to look at the Nico funnel, the possibility of a Nico funnel. Look at workflows that make it manageable for all participating members, so that the onus doesn't fall on one campus or one individual.
Leslie Feldballe: we want to be in conversations about linked data and bibframe.
Leslie Feldballe: They continue to be there, continue to be library of Congress, bigframe updates. There was just one where, as leap was presented and Oclc. Was there. So these are conversations that we want to be a part of because they're products that we use
Leslie Feldballe: and actually versus developing ways to use
Leslie Feldballe: Bibframe linked data within Alma and Oclc is developing ways to support the usage of linked data within existing cataloging workflows, and to me that seems like where the meat and potatoes are, because there's actual
Leslie Feldballe: kind of bridges between the traditional Kellog that we
Leslie Feldballe: cataloging that we do. And this kind of nebulous world of linked data that is talked about in this very, very often feels aspirational way and not very practical way.
Leslie Feldballe: So we want to be part of these conversations.
Leslie Feldballe: we want us. We we work to stay abreast of new developments in Alma. Something that's been
Leslie Feldballe: kind of exciting is their support for different thesauri, including Homosaurus.
Leslie Feldballe: And then how this can affect which
Leslie Feldballe: which the Soi we choose to manage locally at our own institutions in the Nz. And how this authority these authorities, discussions, and vocabulary discussions can affect
Leslie Feldballe: are questions about reparative cataloging. So it all kind of does fit together. These are things that we think about.
Leslie Feldballe: And lastly, I think the conversation that we all just had really ties into my last slide that there is no question that is too basic to come to Smsp or to bring to the interest group.
Leslie Feldballe: we hopefully will be a place where you can ask any question, no matter how granular, no matter how broad
Leslie Feldballe: cataloging is really technical, it's very jargony. It's very much its own language it can feel very, very
Leslie Feldballe: hard to navigate. And then, in addition to it, just being hard to navigate as a an aspect of librarianship, there are rules. But then there's also catalogers judgment. So you get the nuance, and then you get the creativity. But then you get the rules. And so
Leslie Feldballe: you know, finding that play between those can be really
Leslie Feldballe: challenging and thought provoking. And if you're not doing original cataloging regularly, it can be hard to like kind of like.
Leslie Feldballe: remember these things. Remember these rules, and then add to all of that that there's so many different resources for
Leslie Feldballe: figuring out what you need to do that sometimes, just wading through the resources out there is just as challenging as doing the actual cataloging. The documentation can be really dense.
Leslie Feldballe: Finding what you need between Sunni policies or library of Congress guidance or Rda Toolkit. Viv formats and standards. Whatever you're you're you can be going down rabbit holes and not find what you want right away, and it can be very frustrating.
Leslie Feldballe: And then there's all the listservs and other streams of information that we generate, because we're catalogers, and we like to talk about cataloging. So we want to be a helpful
Leslie Feldballe: central place or suny cataloggers, or people who.
Leslie Feldballe: or tangential to cataloging, but have questions about it. Where you can come, you can discuss whatever
Leslie Feldballe: whatever issue might, you know, might come up for you.
Leslie Feldballe: Nothing is too basic. Nothing is too granular, nothing is too broad. We've all had to learn cataloging. We've all been there. So
Leslie Feldballe: we also welcome. Input if there's new projects that you think we should be tackling new trends to watch evolving best practices. We we want to
Leslie Feldballe: stay on top of all of that. So that's what we're here for.
Leslie Feldballe: The interest group is hopefully a way where you can connect with us in a way that feels right for the amount of time and the bandwidth that you have.
Leslie Feldballe: So that's really all I wanted to share. Marthy, I don't know if you want to talk more about the interest group. Or if you want me to mention it anymore, I just know that we have a base camp set up, and we're going to be meeting once a month
Marcy Strong: at one pm. On a on a Wednesday. Right?
Marcy Strong: Alright.
Marcy Strong: you guys seeing my screen.
Marcy Strong: Okay?
Susan Perry (OLIS): Oh, good. You gotta switch to presentation, though. Marcy.
Susan Perry (OLIS): Think that's all.
Marcy Strong: Here we go. Okay? So yes, to follow up on that.
Marcy Strong: please join the metadata interest group.
Marcy Strong: this is kind of how we're envisioning it. It's it's I want to emphasize. It is super low stakes. So it's just a group of us getting together, talking about cataloging and metadata. And this could be in or outside the online environment.
Marcy Strong: It's it's an informal space. Anyone can bring questions to it, or you can just show up. You don't necessarily have to have questions. You just have maybe an open space in your schedule, and you want to participate.
Marcy Strong: So we hope it just provides this space for everyone to comment, to talk about these issues, you know. So if you're working on a jigsaw puzzle in your collection, you're not sure how to catalog it. If you're unsure of the best way to add summary holdings. If you're wondering if anyone uses encoded our global description for their findings, like all these types of things, are all a place like this metadata group as a place for you to come and ask them
Marcy Strong: if you have an idea for a discussion, or if you would like to present on a metadata topic, the metadata interest group might be a good place for you to come.
Marcy Strong: And then we're also keeping. Yeah, the metadata interest groups are going to be kind of managed by the Smsp. And we're hoping, you know, that topics or discussions that come out of this may kind of float up to the Smsp and highlight some work that the Smsp should undertake. If we're we're finding things, you know, that are handled inconsistently across the different scenes that maybe assuming white policy or senior best practice would would help.
Marcy Strong: You know, Shepherd, that along. So so those are all the things that the metadata interest group can be. I think lots of times, though it's just going to be an open space. It's not necessarily going to be anything for the formal. So that's kind of how we're starting it.
Marcy Strong: so please get involved. The the there's going to be a base camp presence. There is a base camp presence you can sign up for right now. There's a message board, so you can post any time.
Marcy Strong: There's going to be monthly meetings, which are the second Wednesday of the month at one Pm.
Marcy Strong: And I also wanted to. Just point this out. So this is, you know, screenshot from base panel. So you can find the metadata interest group by, you know, typing it in or by following the link.
Marcy Strong: you can also, you see this all access, the screen area. These are all of the interest groups that are open that are managed by sending library services. So you may find that in addition to the Metadata interest group, there's other interest groups that are related that you might be interested in
Marcy Strong: the Discovery Interest Group or the Institutional Repositories interest group.
Marcy Strong: We also kind of expect there's going to be natural overlap with the metadata interest group and some of these others. So you know. Please take a look around. And you know these are all kind of low States groups. You just, you know you sign up for them, and you can participate in the conversation or not. It's it's entirely up to you.
Marcy Strong: And we'd love to hear from you about what you would like to see this group do. If there's if there's thoughts you have topics you're interested in.
Marcy Strong: Please join us for our first meeting. It'll be Wednesday, February fourteenth, at one Pm.
Marcy Strong: Or you can post to the Metadata Interest board base camp message board. So
Marcy Strong: so that is everything on the Metadata interest group. We're just going to put it out there and kind of see what happens. So
Marcy Strong: I have someone to mention. Also happening in February fourteenth, February fourteenth, is our love ladder to Metadata Day.
Marcy Strong: at 10 Am. We are having the O Clc. Record Manager session, followed by the first Metadata interest group at one Pm. So
Marcy Strong: put that on your calendar. Valerie Chase library services. Consultant Oclc. Will present an overview to all interested Sunni Library staff and using Oclc. Record manager to search and export bibliographic records.
Marcy Strong: So this is going to be very useful for staff who rely on Oclc. Connection, browser, which will reach and device under. And, as we learn from the survey, about 28 of you are using O Clc. Connection, browser. So please sign up for the record manager session. Everyone is welcome to the time.
Marcy Strong: I also wanted to mention that Sunni Library services will be reaching out to campuses with a series of events to celebrate the 5 year anniversary of Sioux invitation. So resource, management, cataloging, and metadata will certainly be a part of this.
Marcy Strong: If you have concerns or questions about cataloging in the online environment, this is a good opportunity to talk about things further.
Marcy Strong: So in relation to this. There's going to be a benchmarking session on February eighth. Some updated health check list surveys are going to be going up to campuses soon.
Marcy Strong: and we are planning to do some site visits the spring, summer, and potentially fall. So
Marcy Strong: we hope to see sound, if not many of you in person this year, which will be pretty exciting.
Marcy Strong: And then the last thing I wanted to mention which I touched on earlier in the Survey results is, we're very interested in in kind of learning what is going on out there with metadata changes in non-alma environments. So you would like to take undertake some metadata policy creation for the store and the Sdr physical repository environments.
Marcy Strong: And we're planning to develop some some metadata best practices. The campuses can use when uploading their content systems.
Marcy Strong: You know, this will help users better find what they're looking for. It will help systems better index the content, and will help campuses better prepare their data for sharing. So
Marcy Strong: if your campus has already developed some local policies, we would love to see them. So we know how important interoperability is, and we'd like to take what you're doing into consideration before we sort of develop our own.
Marcy Strong: So if you have some policies and you're willing to share them. You can email us at info at Sunniolis that live, answers.com. And you can include a link to the policies if they're online, or you can include a file attachment in your email.
Marcy Strong: So that was everything I had about sls, Maureen, did you have any updates before we switch over to Valerie.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): No updates. But I just wanna say this has been an incredibly wonderful session. Thank you. Everyone so much. Leslie, Marcy, Susan, David and Maria from the original group. And now the new SMS. P. And really looking forward to a lot of the incredible work that's gonna be happening. I think it's time we're ready, or you know we're moving forward.
Maureen Clements (SUNY): I'm really excited. That OCLC. Is here, too, to to talk a little bit more about what their plans are. And
Maureen Clements (SUNY): Great
Marcy Strong: alright, Valerie, I guess it is all yours.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Hi! It's nice to see everybody here today. I recognize some names. I know I've worked with some of you. On different parts of the subscriptions here and there. A quick introduction. My name is Valerie Chase, and I am the library services consultant for cataloging and metadata. So III focus just on that subscription.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I thought I would just do a quick mention. Because we
Valerie Chase (OCLC): have had a sort of transl transition in our staff. Many of you are probably in the past used to working with Leslie Lloyd. She was the account manager in New York for many, many years.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): She is focusing she's on a different team where she works solely with Mls today, and if you haven't met her yet, you're a new account manager as Carrie sites. I know she's been actively visiting many libraries, because I see the call reports and have done some follow up with her, and then, of course, Mary and Kearney continues to work with the arl libraries in the Suny office.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So just to kind of try to put it. put a perspective on the different names and faces that work with you in your subscription.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So I was asked today to do sort of an overview presentation. So I did put a few slides together. I don't mind being interrupted. If there, there are questions on any of them, so not a lot of time left. So let me go ahead and share my
Valerie Chase (OCLC): presentation, and we will begin
Valerie Chase (OCLC): whoops. I'm not a zoom. Oh, here it is. Too many different ways to do group meetings.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Okay, I'm guessing.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Everybody can see. Yeah, so fantastic. So I've done the introduction, I'm gonna start first slide. It isn't really an update. But it is important to me, because when I say, I work with cataloging and metadata sort of here's my, here's everything I'm responsible for on one screen. But it also represents
Valerie Chase (OCLC): what you have in your metadata subscription. Your cataloging and metadata subscription, and that is the cataloging Tools
Valerie Chase (OCLC): record manager connection. Those have been mentioned several times today. The automation tools that fall under the collection manager, umbrella, the data sync partner collections.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): updates, query collections and knowledge base. And there's a few updates associated to some of these.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): And then, of course, you do have the custom solutions that are available. The C 3, 9 dot 50 and the Apis.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So I just wanna start with mentioning that. And now specific to browser which has already been mentioned, record manager and some connection. Updates. I'll start with browser
Valerie Chase (OCLC): As has been said, that is, being discontinued as of April thirtieth of this year. So still plenty of time to learn record manager, and, as has been stated
Valerie Chase (OCLC): on February fourteenth. Happy Valentine's day! I will be with all of you who join that session to do an overview of record manager.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So collection manager is. So we tend to talk about collection manager sort of in
Valerie Chase (OCLC): broad terms, but it really is broken down to different parts, and you don't have to take advantage of every part. So this sort of varied usage among this the Sunni colleges. But there are a couple of updates that I just want to mention quickly.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): one is related to automatic holdings management. So I'll do sort of a quick background. That sort of separates. What is the difference between all the collections that you can define? In collection, manager with automatic holdings, management, automatic holding speeds.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So these are vendors that we have worked with partner with, so that if you have a a subscription with them, and you have your own coverage, because titles can vary from package to package and embargo can vary and coverage within a title can vary. So when we work with these vendors and you have the automatic holding speed set up.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Then they deliver to Oclc the specific data related to your subscription, so that when we do those automatic updates it isn't at a package level. It is specific to your institution.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So we have several that we're working with now, and many of you are probably taking advantage of those, but we also are working currently. To add
Valerie Chase (OCLC): 3 more for the
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and and that sage Oxford in Cambridge. So look for those to be added. Soon.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I wanted to take a second just to talk about some of the updates that we do. We J. It stands for just in time. So collection manager
Valerie Chase (OCLC): from a collection of choice is evolving on a regular basis.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and we do updates to let you know. New collections are added. New collections that are collections that have been removed.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): The JIT updates is much longer than what I'm representing on this slide. But
Valerie Chase (OCLC): what you may not be aware of, and and I have found very interesting are the collections that your peers are creating. So the cooperative contributed collections that are
Valerie Chase (OCLC): passed on to the global. A collection for anybody to select
Valerie Chase (OCLC): are always listed
Valerie Chase (OCLC): in a monthly report. But there's also a weaker report that's available. In the community center
Valerie Chase (OCLC): can talk a little bit about more more about community centre. Hopefully, you
Valerie Chase (OCLC): folks on this phone call ha! Have joined the community center and you're checking it. Or you're getting email updates. There are lots of different options for using the community center. But one of them are these contributed collections, and these are these. This was a list from January one to 5, and you can see that the William and Mary libraries had
Valerie Chase (OCLC): created a collection and contributed it what it allows. There are many things that allows you to do, but one of them is that if you do have Etd or some other electronic collection, some Pdfs that exist on
Valerie Chase (OCLC): your server somewhere, and maybe they have been cataloged. But the mark records are sort of. They're all in worldcat, but you have to do the correct search to find them. What you can do by creating a collection is, you take all those mark records. You put them in a collection, and if you choose to, you can share it globally. And what that means is, if another institution selects that collection, we can deliver them. Those mark records.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): really, and that allows them to then
Valerie Chase (OCLC): load those mark records so that they're searchable from their Ils. Obviously, if you've cataloged them, they're searchable from worldcat or ill, or or discovery. But it's really about getting to those users. So in this example, like the Wolf Law Library. It's a very specific law collection, so it could be very beneficial for another institution to load that. Have that free package collection and have those mark records delivered to them, and and searchable from the Ils.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So to round it all up might.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): The simple point is that if you haven't looked at this report, the jit updates, it's a great one to look at, not only for vendor collections, but also what are your Ps. Doing, and what are they contributing?
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I wanted to mention this isn't new. This was January 20 Si believe. January 22 was like sort of when this decision was made. And that is the ability to do a streamline holdings update. I did check. And there's only been a couple of Sunni libraries that have taken advantage of this, but I suspect that, and I believe that most of you did a reclamation before you made the move to Alma
Valerie Chase (OCLC): And so if if that's the case, you're probably in pretty good shape. But keep in mind that the you can do this streamline holding update at any time. It's party subscription. It's it's free. We do all the heavy lifting. And it is
Valerie Chase (OCLC): something that you can take advantage of II am guessing that I know that you have the data sync set up. So you're getting those holdings automatically updated. So I think everything is probably pretty clean and staying in sync
Valerie Chase (OCLC): but this is available.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Okay, so has anybody looked at any recent announcements that OCLC. Has made about world cat entities about you, our eyes like just yesterday.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So I wanted to take some time to talk about this so world cat entities, if you're not familiar, has been around for a couple of years now. We've worked with advisory groups. We've had pilot projects. There have been a variety of announcements made related to world entities and sort of it's evolution to this point.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): but it
Valerie Chase (OCLC): There are at this point 150 million, maybe more entities that are searchable and that publicly available on on the website on that you can see here if you haven't had the opportunity to to go in and and just explore. I recommend that you do so. There's lots of really great information. It's evolving all the time, and we have been working on that. The infrastructure of that
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and the recent announcement that was made yesterday was specific to linking those U ris, as mentioned in the worldcat records.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): so that there is so that there's a connection there. There's a movement there now, and and this is sort of early early stages. So you can when you, if you haven't seen them, or if you have seen in your world cat records all of a sudden all these
Valerie Chase (OCLC): subfield ones are appearing in your, you know, 100 600 647, 6, 4, one 707 58. So if you haven't seen that, look out for that.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): they're there. We did some automations where we populated
Valerie Chase (OCLC): a lot of records. And what the announcement was about yesterday was really the the first time that we are involving more than just the advisory groups and the testing groups. We've added some features to record manager that's
Valerie Chase (OCLC): bringing anybody in that wants to start working with that integration between the worldcat records and the entities database.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I have a couple more things to mention about that
Valerie Chase (OCLC): from a future perspective.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I encourage you to attend the meeting. That will be February second, and product management usually
Valerie Chase (OCLC): is the main contributor from the Opi, O Clc side on this, and they will be speaking specifically about some future direction.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): what I'm going to talk about today is what we released
Valerie Chase (OCLC): so entities lots of information about the entities database. It's out there. It's accessible. Anybody can go in search it, explore it. Submit ideas feedback to us. We now have the links, and that was the announcement yesterday. And along with that announcement,
Valerie Chase (OCLC): we put up release notes.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So what I thought I would do for today, since they just brought their release notes out yesterday many of you may not have even had time to to look at the release notes is just pull them into the Powerpoint presentation and sort of
Valerie Chase (OCLC): do a quick walkthrough as it is delivered in the release notes. And certainly you can download these, and I can share these release notes. They're out there.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So
Valerie Chase (OCLC): if you're familiar with record manager
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and you've done anything from the edit menu or the right click menu.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Then this is just an additional option that's now available. so in this example.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I'm in a 100 author record vib record, not authority record. I right click. And I say, import. Insert vocat entities.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Then that's what the option looks like.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and I'm just going to go to
Valerie Chase (OCLC): And this is fairly small for me, hopefully. But what it does is it does a search. It actually passes the information in the mark tag. It does a search, it searches worldcat entities, and it presents you the information back.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and you can The entity itself is clickable. So you can go right into the entity's database if you want to
Valerie Chase (OCLC): to verify. That is the one that you want. typically, there is a description about, are they an author? Are they contributor? So you can
Valerie Chase (OCLC): usually decide right away if you have the right one? And when you just
Valerie Chase (OCLC): add the entity it, as you can see down here inserts the dollar one and it inserts that entity, and it is a linked field at that point.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): So that's sort of without going into training. That's the highlights. The release notes have done a a very good job of walking you through. I was.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I hadn't spent a lot of time with it. I was able to take the release notes and pretty quickly go in and very easily
Valerie Chase (OCLC): see what it looks like. Add some didn't save them but went through the process. So I guarantee you'll be able to do that
Valerie Chase (OCLC): at the bottom of the release notes is, and I highlighted it in green because it sort of got lost in all the fanfare of the ability to add the Uri
Valerie Chase (OCLC): dollar ones to mark tags is a change in
Valerie Chase (OCLC): ha! The limit that was available for export files. So when you and this is specific to record manager. They increase the limit for individual file size to be 500 records.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): There are some known issues that you can read through. This isn't in the
Valerie Chase (OCLC): record manager release notes, but I pulled it into here, because I think it's very important for those of you who use collection manager. That work with collection manager that use the worldcad updates. One of the things that you have the ability to do is get a record back if something significant changes one xxx. Whatever you define. So they've added that so
Valerie Chase (OCLC): It came in as a default of no cause right now there's a lot of activity. You'd probably be getting lots of records. But it's something to keep in mind down the road.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): once we're through all of our automations. And we've
Valerie Chase (OCLC): gone through the algorithms and set those Uri's. And then you have individual members who are contributing and adding that if you're interested, you can get updates based on that. So that's a new feature in the institution settings specific to rocat updates as part of collection manager.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Oops didn't want to do those that was.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): Those were the updates, and it looks like I fit my time in.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): I am going to
Valerie Chase (OCLC): stop the share and see if there are any questions
Marcy Strong: that was great, what happened if if someone doesn't have an entity yet, if you're in record manager and you're doing that search, it doesn't look like all the entities are available yet.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): that's true. And one of the things when you either attend or watch a recording of that February second
Valerie Chase (OCLC): They'll probably I think they're gonna address that a little bit, because on top of entities, what isn't there yet is
Valerie Chase (OCLC): the an editing the ability to edit an ad, and that's coming
Valerie Chase (OCLC): and product management will give you the detail on that. And what the timeframes are, cause, as you. You know they're always sliding right any day if you work with product and development. But it is
Valerie Chase (OCLC): that will be the next step. This is really just one step in many. And it's the first piece
Valerie Chase (OCLC): where members have beyond. You know, they, the advisory teams, the ability to actually
Valerie Chase (OCLC): do work and then do that linking. And more to come once the editing part is set on top of the entities.
Marcy Strong: Okay, thank you. Any other questions for Valerie. I know we're we're right at time.
Marcy Strong: Well, Valerie, we look forward to seeing you on Valentine's day doing so much with link data. It's really exciting stuff that you guys are up to
Valerie Chase (OCLC): fine, you know, if you can't attend, if you sign up, you will get an email with a recording. So I recommend that at minimum.
Susan Perry (OLIS): So, Valerie, quick question for you. This is Susan Perry. I have a couple of questions that I was gonna bring up at the at the February fourteenth session, is it? Okay? If I email you those ahead of time, just to make sure that you, you know. Okay, great thanks.
Valerie Chase (OCLC): If you don't have my contact, then Marcy has it. So yeah, I know I have it. I'm good. Thanks. Okay.
Susan Perry (OLIS): II have a couple of campuses that are they don't need record manager, but they can use it like, if they're not, if their client connections not available, and they're working from remote location. But we just have a couple of questions about some of the features the way they cross walk. So I will shoot you an email about that
Marcy Strong: alright. Well, thank you. Everyone. Please join the metadata interest group. Reach out to the SMS key. You know, we're we're trying to create space to have these conversations, and we really love to hear more from you, and we hope to be kind of doing this on a more regular basis. So so thank you all for coming. And I'm gonna stop the recording now, and we'll make it available if you want to review or share with your colleagues. So
Marcy Strong: thank you. Thanks.