My library recently implemented WorldCat Local as the default catalog/discovery interface for our collections. I learned about a new book today, so I went to the our new catalog to see about getting a copy. I typed the title of the book (“bright sided”) into the WorldCat Local search box and clicked search. The first page of  search results gave me 4 articles that appear to provide reviews of the book. You can see for yourself the remaining 6 results, all articles, none of which appear to have anything to do with either the book or the terms I searched. For example, the title of the 5th item is:  “The physical state and plasma biochemical profile of young calves on arrival at a slaughter plant.”  When I do an Advanced search and enter my terms as Title, the book shows up as the 5th item in the results list (below the reviews and the “fold”,  so I must scroll down to discover this).

When I do a keyword search on the terms “bright sided” in the old catalog interface, I get the response “no entries found” and a prominently placed button that I can click on to pass my search through to our consortial catalog, Summit, where the book comes up as the first item in the results list.

This seems like a pretty common use case: person finds out about a new book and goes to the library to see if they can borrow a copy. Which catalog interface performs better for the user? I’d say the old catalog since it tells me immediately that my library does not own the book in question, and provides an easy way for me to repeat my search in the consortial catalog, where the book is found immediately, and I can request it immediately. Because WorldCat Local automatically promotes hits for items owned by my library to the top of the results display, regardless of any other measure of relevancy to the search, the WorldCat Local interface plunges me into confusion and leaves me there wondering where to go next to find the answer to the relatively simple question: can I borrow this book? Ironically, the free WorldCat.org interface actually does a better job of answering my question than subscription-based WorldCat Local because the book appears as the first hit in the results list, and it shows libraries near me (based on my IP address) that own the book.

Perhaps the “show me first what my library owns” algorithm that is the main product distinction/selling point of WorldCat Local works better with fuzzier, topical keyword searches. I don’t know, I haven’t really researched that.  It sure doesn’t seem to offer the best approach  for known item searches, however, especially in cases where the local library doesn’t own a given title (or doesn’t have holdings attached properly in WorldCat).

Last week, I attended a Symposium on Teaching with Digital Collections in the Liberal Arts Curriculum at Reed College. The program consisted of a day and a half filled with presentations by librarians and faculty who are building and teaching with digital assets, primarily images, at various liberal arts colleges in the U.S.

Key takeaways:

• Building effective digital collections requires investment of considerable time, planning, and other resources. Most of the institutions represented at the symposium have staff who focus primarily on digital asset management, and many have used grant funding to get started and/or expand their infrastructure and build collections.
• Partnering with “early adopter” teaching faculty is a good way to get started with building digital collections. This can give the project a clear focus and help keep it manageable. It can also help with selection of content that will be used and creation of high quality metadata.
• Most of the presenters at the symposium use ContentDM to manage their digital collections. ContentDM has not completely met their needs, however. Reed, for example, has built a number of extensions to improve the faculty/end-user interface and functionality. Lewis and Clark College has built an interesting site using Flickr for storage, but they also utilized some custom programming for their accessCeramics collection.

Links to interesting sites discussed at the symposium:

• Claremont Libraries Digital Collections (CCDL)
• Reed College Digital Collections
• Lafayette College Digital Collections
  
• Art Images for College Teaching (AICT)
• accessCeramics

Arghhh!! When will this insanity end?

I’ve spent a good portion of the past two days struggling to update the records in our online catalog for titles included in Oxford Reference Online. This process is so annoying and frustrating that I’m about ready to give up entirely. Why don’t I? Because I need to add our holdings for these titles to WorldCat.

A couple of years ago, I made the mistake of loading the MARC records provided in the database publisher’s free record set into our local catalog. The main problem now is that I need to get holdings for these titles added to OCLC in support of the new, WorldCat based Summit catalog. So, no problem, I thought, I’ll just extract the ISBN numbers from the publisher-supplied records I still have in the database, put those into a text file, and do a batch search of WorldCat to download these records to a local file in Connexion, and then export the records to our local catalog, overlaying on ISBN number. Sounds pretty straightforward, but it’s actually a huge pain the butt!

First problem: I used screen-scraping (only method possible) to gather current ISBNs for the 71 titles that we still have the non-OCLC records for in our database and saved them in a plain text file that I then uploaded for batch searching in Connexion Client. All 71 of them came up with multiple matches, even though I used all possible limits to try to restrict my searching to just records for the online/electronic resource versions of these books. I’ve slogged through records for about 15 titles so far, and I’ve observed common characteristics that appear on the most acceptable records, but Connexion Client won’t let me filter records within my local file based on those characteristics (e.g. a specific member library symbol in the 040, encoding level I, etc.). So, the only way to select the records to use for this project is to look through all of the 3-5 records retrieved for each ISBN. To catalog 71 titles, therefore, I must examine 3-5 times that many records. If OCLC is going to permit so many duplicate records in WorldCat, they really need to give us more options for limiting and filtering the records retrieved in response to a search. In this case, if I could limit to records with a particular encoding level, English language records (OCLC only allows you to limit based on the language of the content, not the record itself), or contributed by a particular member library other than DLC, it would save me a lot of work. And I would have to do this just to add our holdings to WorldCat, even if I weren’t exporting the records to our local catalog as well.

Second problem: I have to review and make some edits to each record, even if the record is of good quality. Notably, I must update the 049 and add a 949 to each record in order to get our III system to process the records correctly when they load. I wrote a macro that does most of this work for me, but that took me about an hour this morning, including the time I had to spend updating our III load profiles to optimize overlay based on ISBN. Even after specifying that overlay comparison be based upon the normalized form of the ISBN in the 020 field, the III system doesn’t seem to normalize the 020 correctly in all cases. For example, when the ISBN is followed by (pbk.), the III normalization program retains pbk as part of the ISBN, so overlay doesn’t work if that isn’t on the incoming OCLC record. Thus, I have to check and clean up the 020 fields in the existing records in our catalog or the overlay won’t work in many cases.

Third problem: The titles in this database are based on the latest edition of the same title in print. And the publisher doesn’t provide any kind of notification or list of updated content, so you’re left on your own to find the updated titles. Since it has been a year since I last worked on this database, I need to search for updated content and dead links at this point, too. This leads to lots more manual review and checking, since there is no way other than human review to determine if the bibliographic record matches the content currently online at the database site.

This is too hard! And I, as the cataloger, am too distracted keeping track of all the mechanical aspects of searching, selecting, and downloading records to focus attention on the intellectual aspects of cataloging, like providing subject access to these resources that suits our local context. There has to be a better way to do this kind of stuff!!!

Something I hope to read when I get a chance:
Nonsubscription side of periodicals : changes in library operations and costs between print and electronic formats / by Roger C. Schonfeld