Occasional Progress Report 15 – December 15, 2014
Hi everyone:
Here’s the latest on what’s been happening with 2CUL Technical Services Initiatives (TSI). This report, along with past updates, is also available in the Project Reports section of the TSI wiki.
- The first phase of TSI produced a wealth of information about technical services processes. As you may recall, the functional teams examined all aspects of their respective operations. The report of the Print Serials Group was especially interesting because work is chiefly centralized at Cornell and chiefly decentralized at Columbia leading to dramatically different practices for functions such as serials checkin or claiming. In Phase 2, we are looking more closely at organizational differences, institutional cultures and variant practices from a research perspective and also to set the groundwork for the kind of workflow analysis that will need to take place when we move to a new ILS. Jim LeBlanc, Deb Warfield, Robert Rendall and Kate Harcourt have been talking to supervisors in the Sciences, Starr East Asian, Central Periodicals and Avery to learn more and will be conducting similar discussions at Cornell in January.
- Cornell is part of a Mellon grant to study linked data for libraries (LD4L) and part of their work includes using the MARC to BIBFRAME conversion as a use case. BIBFRAME is expected to replace MARC and be a more web-based, linked data encoding standard. Columbia, through 2CUL is able to tap into this effort. A notable success was our ability to negotiate a BIBFRAME training program that was about a third of the cost that we would have paid separately. We also have a joint working group that works through questions and real life examples together.
- In previous reports, we noted that Cornell and Columbia purchased the Serials Solutions Consortial Edition. After data migration and testing, the 2CUL E-Resources Team recommended that 2CUL not renew the Consortial Edition. It will not support the type of collaborative work that had been envisioned since it was designed for traditional library consortia. The team will continue to explore workflow efficiencies using our separate Serials Solutions instances with the advantage that our subscription data is now on a common platform. The E-Resources team is also investigating slow Serials Solutions response time including the use of WebEx recordings to illustrate problems in real time. This is another area where 2CUL is stronger together and has more influence with vendors.
- The Non-MARC Metadata Working Groups continue to share information in joint meetings. Jason Kovari from Cornell recently participated in a METRO panel on Web Archiving: Experiences, Perspectives, and Possibilities with Alex Thurman and moderated by Anna Perrici.
- Future 2CUL activities include joint exploration of the OCLC Low Barrier Metadata Creation Tool, joint e-resource management, Alma planning, and continued exploration of BIBFRAME.
That’s all for now. As always, please feel free to direct questions to your supervisors or to any member of the TSI Steering Committee: Jim LeBlanc, Adam Chandler, Colleen Major, Robert Rendall, or me.
- Kate Harcourt (on behalf of the 2CUL TSI Steering Committee)