ALA 2010 mid-winter: Metadata Interest Group meeting

At the ALCTS Metadata Interest Group meeting on January 17, 2010, Roy Tennant of OCLC Research spoke of OCLC’s Cloud Library project, which provides large-scale data comparison and analysis of NYU’s print monograph holdings with the HathiTrust repository, NYU’s ReCAP off campus shelving collection, and the WorldCat database. OCLC Cloud Library mashup of these different metadata streams is to provide NYU with useful information so that it can determine the proportion of the local collection that may be more cost-effectively sourced from alternative service providers while satisfying current service expectations of library patrons and staff. The project identified public domain vs. in copyright materials in humanities subjects since most Hathi materials are humanities based. Questions about managing print collections being considered are:
* Will large off campus shelving and delivery services continue to provide a cost-effective solution to the challenge of managing a local physical inventory that is (increasingly) duplicated in digital format?
* Can a library think about moving items to storage and descessioning if titles are in the HathiTrust?
* Can cooperative service models reduce costs and increase efficiencies in managing local print collections?
* What requirements are needed to sustain long-term business partnerships and operational workflows between academic libraries and shared collection service providers?
* What kinds of organizational and economic models are needed to sustain ‘Web-scale’ collection management regimes?
* Can Web-scale management services provide greater cost benefit to libraries?

Jennifer Bowen, University of Rochester, shared insights of the Metadata Services Toolkit (MST), one of three modules under development by the University of Rochester as part of the eXtensible Catalog (XC – http://www.extensiblecatalog.org). The MST open-source platform for automating the processing of large batches of metadata in any XML-based schema. This open source toolkit enables a library to synchronize metadata from multiple repositories. Specifically, it has its own faceted interface that
*enables libraries to automatically process batches of metadata
* can be used by other front-end systems, e.g., Summon, Primo-—is designed to serve as a middle layer for any system that can harvest data
* has services to clean up and normalize inconsistent metadata (currently handles MARC and DC, but ultimately can be extended to any XML metadata), transforms metadata from one schema to another, aggregates records that represent the same resource so that the library can manage relationships between FRBR levels, as well as provides authority control, i.e., matching headings against MARCXML authority file and then populate records with the proper authoritative form/identifier.