Violeta Ilik

Cataloger Makeover: Creating Non-MARC Name Authorities

This article shares a vision of the enterprise of cataloging and the role of catalogers and metadata librarians in the twenty-first century. The revolutionary opportunities now presented by Semantic Web technologies liberate catalogers from their historically analog-based static world, re-conceptualize it, and transform it into a world of high dimensionality and fluidity. By presenting illustrative examples of innovative metadata creation and manipulation, such as non-MARC name authority records, we seek to contribute to the libraries’ mission with innovative projects that enable discovery, development, communication, learning, and creativity, and hold promise to exceed users’ expectations.

Off-Site Storage from a Cataloging Point of View

This article focuses on the challenges faced by the serials cataloging staff at Texas A&M University Libraries following a decision to move materials to an off-site storage facility. The process of cataloging review developed by serials cataloging staff to address these challenges is described in detail. More specifically, the process that deals with the preparation of the collections for off-site storage, with emphasis on the unique problems created by serials that have been cataloged under pre–Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, Second Edition (AACR2) rules is described.

Can Viewshare Be Used as a Research Network Visualization Tool? A Case Study Based on STEM Departments at Texas A&M University

The use of open source platforms based on Linked Data principles allows for data collection, manipulation, and visualization of bibliographic information, and, in particular, authoritative authorship data. Viewshare was utilized to discover authorship patterns and trends among faculty members of the science, geoscience, and engineering colleges at Texas A&M University. The findings include interdisciplinarity of researcher interests and output; patterns in hiring trends over time; and coverage of Texas A&M University faculty members in the National Authority File. These results demonstrate how librarians can utilize Linked Data platforms, such as Viewshare, for assessment of research patterns and productivity, thereby supporting campus analysis of institutional effectiveness. They also provide data useful for library operations, including creation of authority records and refining collection development approaches.

Information Sharing Pipeline

In this paper we discuss a proposal for creating an information sharing pipeline/real-time information channel, where all stakeholders would be able to engage in exchange/verification of information about entities in real time. The entities in question include personal and organizational names as well as subject headings from different controlled vocabularies. The proposed solution is a shared information pipeline where all stakeholders/agents would be able to share and exchange data about entities in real time. Three W3C recommended protocols are considered as potential solutions: the Linked Data Notifications protocol, the ActivityPub protocol, and the WebSub protocol. We compare and explore the three protocols for the purpose of identifying the best way to create an information sharing pipeline that would provide access to most up to date information to all stakeholders.

DigitalHub: A Repository Focused on the Future

ABSTRACT The DigitalHub scholarly repository was developed and launched at the Galter Health Sciences Library for the Feinberg School of Medicine and the greater Northwestern Medicine community. The repository was designed to allow scholars the ability to create, share, and preserve a range of citable digital outputs. This article traces the evolution of DigitalHub’s development and engagement activities, highlighting project challenges, innovations, success stories, and the team-based approach that was employed to successfully achieve project goals.

OpenVIVO: Transparency in Scholarship

OpenVIVO is a free and open hosted semantic web platform open to anyone that gathers and shares open data about scholarship around the world. OpenVIVO, based on the VIVO open source platform, provides transparent access to data about the scholarly work of its participants. OpenVIVO demonstrates the use of persistent identifiers, automatic real-time ingest of scholarly ecosystem metadata, use of VIVO-ISF and related ontologies, attribution of work, and publication and reuse of data – all critical components of presenting, preserving, and tracking scholarship. The system was created by a cross-institutional team over the course of three months. The team created and used RDF models for research organizations in the world based on Digital Science GRID data, for academic journals based on data from CrossRef and the US National Library of Medicine, and created a new model for attribution of scholarly work. All models, data, and software are available in open repositories.

Collecting and Digitizing Forgotten Graduate Student Scholarship: The PILOs Project at Texas A&M University

This article describes a project at Texas A&M University Libraries to add a group of legacy student works (Projects in Lieu of Theses or Dissertations, or PILOs) to the collections in both hard copy and digital form. These unique works of institutional scholarship constitute a new area of acquisition for the libraries. The authors describe the new team-based workflows necessitated to evaluate, acquire, catalog, store, digitize, and preserve these reports. The cross-unit team that designed and implemented the project has devised a successful model upon which future collection development efforts can be built.

The Role of XSLT in Digital Libraries, Editions, and Cultural Exhibits

We offer a half day tutorial that will explore the role of XML and XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations, themselves XML documents) in digital library and digital humanities projects. Digital libraries ideally aim to provide both access and interaction. Digital libraries and digital humanities projects should foster edition building and curation. Therefore, this tutorial aims to teach librarians, scholars, and those involved in cultural heritage projects a scripting language that allows for easy manipulation of metadata, pictures, and text. The modules in this tutorial will help participants in planning for their own organizations digital efforts and scholarly communications as well as in facilitating their efforts at digitization and creating interoperability between document editions. In five instructional modules, including hands-on exercises, we will help participants gain experience and knowledge of the possibilities that XSLT offers in transforming documents from XML to HTML, from XML to text, and from one metadata schema to another.