It’s not the End of the World…

Betty Compson and Milton Sills in At the End of the World, Paramount Pictures, 1921

Just the end of the IM Blog!

After two and a half years, it’s time for the last post on the IM Blog.

Much has changed since we began it in April 2013.

The refurbishment of the Brynmor Jones Library has been completed, with a formal re-opening by the Poet Laureate, Dame Carol Ann Duffy, in September. (See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-34262641 )

Throughout the lifetime of our blog, the theme of making research findings available on open access has been a constant thread of growing importance. July this year saw the completion of a major restructuring of Library and Learning Innovation, as part of which Information Management was replaced by Information Services. This group includes the Research Services Team, with new posts dedicated to open access research and its own Twitter account. (See http://www2.hull.ac.uk/lli/research/index.html )

Illustration by Boris Artzybasheff from Verotchka’s Tales by Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, 1922

The library’s staff newsletter has moved from monthly to weekly publication and we now have a blog for the whole of Library and Learning Innovation at https://hullunilibrary.wordpress.com to which which members of Information Services will be contributing.

Now is the obvious time to bow out, with a big thank you to all former IM staff who have contributed to this blog and to all our readers.

What’s In A Name?

Berlin, Isaiah, 1909-1997

We all appreciate the importance of getting someone’s name right. The potential consequences of a mistake with someone’s name range from causing offence to mistaken identity.

Berlin, Irving, 1888-1989

The writer and philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin loved to tell how during the Second World War, Churchill had invited the songwriter Irving Berlin to lunch at 10 Downing Street in mistake for himself. At the time, Sir Isaiah was working for the British Information Office in New York. Churchill, having asked his guest what he thought was his most important recent piece of work, was taken aback when he replied (in a strong New York accent), “I don’t know, it should be A White Christmas, I guess.”

Names play an important role in the retrieval of documents of all kinds, as names of authors, editors, performers or organisations are crucial in identifying the works that they have created, as are the names of people or organisations that may form the subject of these works.

Burdon, Daryl

A major new area of work for our Content and Access Team is the publication on our digital repository, Hydra, of open access research articles written by University of Hull academics. A few weeks ago, I was checking the form of name we were using for Daryl Burdon, Senior Ecological Economist at the Institute of Estuarine & Coastal Studies on the major international source for authors’ Name Authority Records: the Library of Congress Name Authority File. I noticed that there he was listed as “Burdon, D. (Darrel)”, whereas on Hydra he was “Burdon, Daryl”.

I contacted Daryl to verify the correct spelling of his name and then informed the Library of Congress, who in due course updated his Name Authority Record, which you can view at: http://lccn.loc.gov/nb2009003320. It’s gratifying to know that our work here can have a global and lasting impact!

Our thanks to Daryl Burdon for allowing us to use the story of his NAR on this blog.

REF articles on the repository

REF articles on the repository

Unlike many other institutional repositories, Hydra, the University of Hull’s repository has never had a major use case for managing open access research articles. It was set up to manage the University’s digital collections as required, focusing on e-theses, datasets, committee papers and past exam papers. We have always been supportive of open access, and have addressed the occasional requests to manage research articles from individuals, but these have been sporadic.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) has brought open access to the fore in more ways than one, though. HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England) working with the other UK Higher Education funding bodies, has issued a policy for the next REF (assumed to be in 2020) that mandates open access to any journal articles submitted. HEFCE states in its guide to this policy:

‘Open access’ refers to unrestricted, online access to the published findings of research.

We believe that all research arising from HEFCE funding should be as widely and freely accessible as the available channels for dissemination will allow.

Retrospective open access is not permitted, so in Information Management we are gearing up Hydra to receive articles as soon as they have been accepted for publication and then make them available on open access through the ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ routes as appropriate.

Looking ahead has also prompted us to look at what can currently be made available on open access. Over the last few weeks, Content and Access has begun publishing on Hydra some of the journal articles written by University of Hull academic staff which were submitted to the Research Excellence Framework in 2014. At present we have around 60 accessible, but will continue to add more into the future, where licensing and copyright allow us to. You can find them by visiting https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/ and doing a subject search for ‘REF 2014 submission’.

The Cataloguer’s Tale – Part 3

A personal view of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference at the University of Kent in Canterbury

Cathedral Gate Hotel, where I stayed for one night after the conference

Fyt I       It’s all about the users: enhancing our metadata to improve discoverability –evidence from the READ-ability Initiative           

Lynne Dyer – De Montfort University

The Record Enhancement to Aid Discover-ability Initiative, which began in October 2012 aims to improve the experience of library users when interacting with both catalogue and stock and to make the impact of Bib Services more apparent to all library staff at De Montfort University.

The focus is on new and different activities, which where possible will become part of the regular work of the team. To date these have included:

• Moving ebooks on to separate records from hardcopy to improve interoperability and make importing MARC records easier.
• Adding Library of Congress Subject Headings to the many catalogue records that don’t already have them.
• Checking name headings against Library of Congress Name Authorities, thus bringing all titles by the same author together.
• Continuous checking of links to free electronic publications.
• Adding Resource Excellence Framework submissions to the university’s repository.

Overall, the project has greatly increased the visibility of the cataloguing team and also the volume of work it has done.

 

Sheet of fridge magnets bearing catalogue-related and other random words given to all delegates. Seems a shame to break it up!

Fyt II      Holistic cataloguing, or, The fundamental interconnectedness of all things
Céline Carty – Cambridge University Library

The points that Céline Carty made in this talk were drawn from her experiences of managing the Entering Project at Cambridge University Library. Its aim was to streamline the workflow for ‘non-catalogued’ items (that is ones using downloaded records) by eliminating the need for hand-written shelf lists.

As well as a valuable tool for managing the project, she found her written project plan useful as a justification for turning down requests for less urgent work and as a back-up for what she called ‘tactful nagging’ of people whose co-operation was essential.

The relevance of author Douglas Adams’s holistic detective Dirk Gently’s belief in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things was impressed upon Céline by an unforeseen result of her project. Its great success meant that the backlog of uncatalogued books was cleared, but this led in turn to a shelving space crisis. Speak to everyone who might be affected by your project, was her advice. Not only will this make it more likely that potential problems may be spotted in advance, but the people who spot problems may well have the best solution. Face-to-face discussion is the best means of communication, as this minimises misunderstandings.

 

Fyt III     RIMMF demonstration

Alan Danskin – British Library

RIMMF stands for RDA in Many Metadata Formats and is a visualisation tool. There is currently no library management system that can use catalogue records created using the new RDA standard as they are intended. RIMMF gives cataloguers the opportunity to create RDA-compliant records and, crucially, see how they are interlinked. It lacks the complexity of a full-blown cataloguing and retrieval tool, but is designed to help cataloguers think along the lines of RDA rather than those of the long-lived (and much-loved) AACR2.

I found this session very helpful. Having attended a number of sessions on RDA and read about it, without feeling I had fully grasped its principles, I came away from this workshop feeling much more secure in my understanding and wanting to create my own RIMMF database!

 

RIMMF is available to download at:

http://www.marcofquality.com/wiki/rimmf/doku.php?id=download

 

 Envoi

Many of the PowerPoint presentations given at the conference are available at:

http://www.cilip.org.uk/cataloguing-indexing-group/presentations/conference-2014-metadata-making-impact

It only remains for me to thank all the organisers, speakers and delegates who made the conference so interesting and enjoyable.

I can no more, my tale is at an ende.

(Geoffrey Chaucer The franklin’s tale)

 

Maze on the university campus, cathedral in the distance

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year To All Our Readers!

Goodbye Denise

Last week we said goodbye to Denise, our Resource Acquisition Team Leader, after 25 years with us. Most of her library career was spent in the field of periodicals acquisition and management, in which she became an expert. Her final post, which she held from March 2009, expanded her focus to include the acquisition of all formats.  Latterly, she and her team have made a number of contributions to this blog.

As a retirement gift, IM staff bought her a Tony Carter Poetry Books Teapot (pictured above). A collector of special teapots, Denise already has about forty, many of which commemorate milestones in her life.

Her wisdom, experience and generosity will be much missed. We wish her a long and happy retirement.

The Cataloguer’s Tale – Part 2

Mask sculpture by Rick Kirby, outside Marlowe Theatre, Canterbury

A personal view of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference at the University of Kent in Canterbury

Fyt I       Metadata: making an impact in television beyond the archive 

Laura Williams—BBC, Media City Salford

Accurate, consistent metadata is an essential part of contemporary television production. The whole process is now digital, from initial ideas to finished programme. Laura’s Media Management Team is embedded in the various production teams to ensure the effective management of the many digital files that are created. Essential to this is accurate, appropriate and consistent metadata.

While technical metadata is automatically generated, metadata to facilitate discovery and use is created by the Media Management Team. In many cases the team copies metadata from sources such as the Radio Times or IMDb, but programmes that are most likely to be reused are watched by cataloguers so that fuller records can be created.

In the future, more metadata will be created automatically, so the function of metadata managers is shifting away from managing this directly towards training production team members in this area.

 

Fyt II      How do you approach metadata creation when there are no second chances?
Arwen Caddy – Reckitt Benckiser Healthcare UK

The main emphasis of this talk was a ‘dim archive’ of copyright compliant papers held by RB’s research library (in Hull) to back up the registration of its products. To ensure that these papers can’t be tampered with, this archive is locked down. The consequence of this is that once papers have been uploaded to the archive, any metadata relating to them is also locked down, so that mistakes cannot be rectified. If these mistakes mean that the paper cannot be found, the only remedy is to buy and upload a further copy and catalogue it again!

 

Fyt III     Panel discussion: impact of ebook metadata

Robin Armstrong Viner – University of Kent; Duncan Chalmers – Coutts Information Services; Helen Williams – London School of Economics; Jenny Wright – BDS; Anne Welsh – University College London (Chair)

(I counted three Scots in this panel of five. Cataloguing does seem to be a Scottish speciality!)

We all need to take up the issue of poor quality catalogue records with suppliers.

• Where ebooks are bought through patron driven acquisition and the aim is to spend a certain sum of money, is there any motivation for suppliers to improve catalogue records?
• Cataloguers need to be involved in choosing suppliers, so that metadata quality is taken into account.
• While students may prefer ebooks for searching for snippets of information, they prefer hardcopy books for sustained reading and essay writing. It’s not possible to work with six ebooks open at once!
• Students can generally work with whatever ebook platform they are given.
• Ebooks can’t be used equally well on all browsers and devices. Do better-off students now have an advantage that they didn’t have in the days of paper-based learning?

 

Fyt IV    Making an impact with metadata on social media

Claire Sewell – Cambridge University Library

Cambridge University Library makes extensive use of social media to promote its services and collections. Claire’s talk related to her use over the past year of Twitter, Pinterest and a blog to promote the library’s library science collection. Of these three, Pinterest has proved the most popular. The aim of the library science collection board is to draw attention to new additions, linking an image of the book cover to the catalogue record. Launched with only one tweet as publicity, it had 500 followers by the end of its first hour.

Given that the library has already purchased book cover images and that it is using them to publicise the books, it is happy to have them re-used on Pinterest. The library science collection consists of only 2000 items at present. Creating entries for new additions amounts to about twenty minutes work per week.

http://www.pinterest.com/theul/library-science-collection/

 

Fyt V      Metadata output and its impact on the researcher

Anne Welsh – University College London

 The observations in this paper were based on Anne’s own experiences as a researcher. According to the FRBR report of 1998, ‘the elementary uses that are made of … [catalogue] data by the user’ are to find, identify, select and obtain ‘entities… appropriate to the user’s needs’. As cataloguers we have tended to focus on finding and obtaining, but ignored identifying and selecting. Is this why, Anne wonders, users are apt to sit and stare at computer screens?

Making our metadata more easy to download and exploit would go some way to helping users in the tasks of identification and selection. Although many download options are available, the majority are only capable of producing simple bibliographic citations.

A full abstract of this paper, together with the accompanying presentation is available at: http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1450941/.

To be continued…

The mystery of Anne Hughes

I bought a copy of this Penguin edition of The diary of a farmer’s wife 1796-1797 as a Christmas present for my mother in 1981. After reading the preface, I was somewhat dismayed to learn that what I had taken to be the authentic diary of Anne Hughes wasn’t quite what it seemed. The original had disappeared during the Second World War, and the vivid account of late 18^th century country life I was reading was at least in part a retelling by a 20^th century farmer’s daughter called Jeanne Preston. Significantly, Anne Hughes’s name didn’t appear on the front cover and was given on the title page only in the quotation ‘Anne Hughes, her boke in wiche I write what doe…’

When last week a copy of the diary came my way to be catalogued for WISE (the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation), I thought I would look further into the matter. Soon I came across the interesting and informative Anne Hughes’ Diary website, obviously the result of many years’ research. The matter of the authenticity of the diary is a good deal more complicated than I had thought. Stories told by the Preston family about how Jeanne came by the book don’t entirely add up. There is considerable doubt as to how much of the diary is original and how much was written by Jeanne Preston. Anne Hughes may have been a real person or she may been an invention. If you enjoy historical mysteries, have a look at the website: http://www.annehughesdiary.co.uk.

Now came the matter of cataloguing the diary. My first priority was to decide on the main author. Cataloguing rules say that the adaptor of a work should be treated as the main author, so this meant Jeanne Preston. As she isn’t named on the title page, I had to provide a note explaining as briefly as I could the complex authorship of the diary. Clearly people would look for the diary under Anne Hughes, so I gave her headings both as added author and subject.

My next priority was to assign the book an appropriate class mark. Literature seemed a better description of ‘Anne Hughes, her boke’ than history. I had to create an author class number for Jeanne Preston in Library of Congress class PR (English literature), as she hasn’t come to the notice of that august institution yet! Interestingly Anne Hughes has her own Library of Congress name heading: Hughes, Anne, active 1796-1797. This puts her in the distinguished company of other quasi-historical and fictitious people who also who have LC name headings, such as King Arthur, Sir John Mandeville and Pseudo-Dionysius, the Areopagite.

Incidentally, for those of you who would like to read the diary, we have a copy of the slightly earlier Allen Lane edition in the Brynmor Jones Library, which I have recatalogued and reclassified to match the Penguin copy at WISE.

The Cataloguer’s Tale – Part 1

This book’s mine! (Chantry of Henry IV, Canterbury Cathedral)

Proem

Thank you all of you who made kind comments about the the pseudo-Chaucerian prologue to my tale that I posted last month. The tale itself is in prose, but I hope won’t be too prosaic.

In early September I attended a conference at the University of Kent in Canterbury – “the York of the South”. Organised by the Cataloguing and Indexing Group of CILIP (the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals), its title was: Metadata: Making an Impact.

In my prologue I rashly declared:

What happened there, the presentatiouns,
The talkes and the demonstatiouns,
I shall yow telle, both with text and gloze…

Like Andrew Marvell, I haven’t ‘world enough and time’, so can only give you brief impressions of what seemed to me the highlights of the conference.

Fyt I       The Impact of BIBFRAME             

Thomas Meehan — University College London

The Library of Congress’s BIBliographic FRAMEwork project (BIBFRAME for short) is currently developing a new model for bibliographic description in today’s online environment. Part of its remit is to find a replacement for the MARC catalogue record format, but its aspirations are much wider than this. In the new world of linked data, the focus is on separate entities such as Work (distinct intellectual or artistic creations) and Creator and the links between them, rather than on individual traditional catalogue records. A further difference between MARC and BIBFRAME is that BIBFRAME is a model or environment rather than a format. The future of bibliographic description is likely to be one of multiple models and formats, so that BIBFRAME and its associated formats will not enjoy the dominance that MARC has had until now.

Fyt II      RDA and the Cascading Vortex of Horror             

Alan Danskin – British Library

First, an explanation of the title. RDA is Resource Description and Access, the new, unified cataloguing standard. ‘The cascading vortex of horror’ refers to the separate and often uninformative production, publication, distribution and manufacture statements that RDA requires cataloguers to make if the item being catalogued provides insufficient information. As the British Library Representative on the Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, Alan has produced proposals that would greatly simplify the current RDA instructions for recording data of this kind, while at the same time making the information that is recorded more useful.

I was intrigued to learn that from time to time publishers, who have imperfect or non-existent records of their past publications, come to the British Library asking for complete lists of their publications. Cataloguers have been diligently recording publication details for many years, but at present this information can’t be used to its full potential in most catalogues. If RDA were to make Publisher an entity (and therefore a key access point) and allow Place as an entity in descriptive as well as in subject cataloguing, this would greatly improve the situation.

To be continued…

 

Whaling logbook data added to Hydra

The latest collection of datasets to be added to Hydra, our institutional repository, are the ARCdoc UK Whaling Logbooks between 1750 and 1850 and the ARCdoc Hudson’s Bay voyages

This dataset series contains spreadsheet data collated from actual Hudson’s Bay Company whaling logbooks between 1750 and 1850.

The datasets were compiled by the ARCdoc Team – University of Sunderland, SPRI (Cambridge University), the Met Office and University of Hull. Staff in our Maritime Historical Studies Centre uploaded these datasets which we were then able to publish on Hydra.The aim of ARCdoc is to use historical documents such as ship’s logbooks to study climate change in the Arctic regions between 1750 and 1850, but of course the data may be used for many purposes.

You can see records for each collection with a fuller description of content at https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:8660 and https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:8888. Choose the Show collection members link to find data from individual logs, such as this one for the 1830 voyage of the Eagle. (Click on it for a larger image.)

Like the others listed at https://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:8660 this voyage started at Hull. For each of the Hull ships, an enlargeable Google map of its errant course is provided.

The Cataloguer’s Tale – The prologue

It’s some time now since we last had a new post on the IM Blog. We’ve all been busy moving back into the library and settling down there while continuing the group’s day-to day work. In addition, many of us have been taking summer breaks.

Last week, your blogmaster went to a CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group Conference at the University of Kent in Canterbury.  That ancient city will forever be associated with Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales, hence the title of this post and hence the prologue below.  The ‘tale’ itself will follow in a later post and, to the relief of all, it will be in modern English prose.

In September with an hert full merrie,
From Hessle beside Hull to Caunterbury
(The universite there for to seke)
A cataloguer did hys journey make,
By rail-way to Kinges Cross, eftsoon
On foot to Hooly Pancras Statioun.
The hellish Underground no more he nedeth:
By Channel Tunnel Link therefrom he spedeth.
A conference in Kent mote he attende –
For cataloguers – this hys journey’s ende.
What happened there, the presentatiouns,
The talkes and the demonstatiouns,
I shall yow telle, both with text and gloze,
In modern Englisshe and, for ease, in prose.

To be continued…