Present: Nancy Boggess-Korekach, Marshall Breeding, Zora Breeding, , Mary Charles Lasater, Jacob Schaub, Bill Walker, Roberta Winjum.
Minutes submitted by Zora
- Introduction of new committee member, Jacob Schaub.
- Marshall gave Jake an introduction to the Metadata Committee and the types of topics that we normally deal with and other issues that have been on the agenda over time. Jake told the group that 60% of his job would be cataloging, 10% would be dealing with the Global Music Archive, 5% would be website creation and maintenance. His desk duty would not start until May.
- Helguera digital pilot project.
- Roberta gave an overview and the latest update on this project to digitize a sample of the Colombian pamphlets, broadsides, newspapers and programmes from Dr. Helguera’s collection in order to write a grant to digitize the whole collection. Roberta has a couple of scanners and is ascertaining which would be better to use. Jodie Gambill will write the database. Molly Poremski is creating a list of metadata fields needed. Laura Matthews and Carol Skricki will do the scanning. The next step will be a meeting with Roberta, Molly, Jodie and Ronee, our current DC expert, to discuss the fields to be included.
- Roberta asked for the committee’s suggestions on fields as well. In addition to the fields already identified, the group suggested adding:
- Corporate body in addition to editor for the agency or other body that was not necessarily the editor/creator.
- Identifier number field for the Special Collections assigned number.
- Geographic facet so that Colombia would be a useful facet in the wider world of DiscoverLibrary or other larger aggregations.
- The time-frame for this project: grant proposal to NEH by the end of May. Paula Covington and Roberta Winjum will be writing the grant proposal. Nancy mentioned that several staff members have recently taken a grant writing course and may be able to make suggestions.
- An issue was brought up about how these digital collections are described. Do they each need a separate database or could they be incorporated into something like DiscoverArchive. There was general agreement that a separate entity is useful to the scholar looking for the particular collection. The other separate databases, such as Global Music Archive, have many unique searching features possible in the native database that are not possible in a larger DiscoverLibrary environment. Marshall asked what sorts of unique features the Helguera materials may have that could be brought out better in a separate database. Zora suggested that Professor Helguera's annotations could be one such feature. A note specific to these annotations may be very useful for the database, but could be mapped to a more general note field for export.
- Unicorn / Symphony beta testing: any metadata/cataloging implications.
- The committee discussed the involvement of the library in the beta testing of Unicorn. The current version of Unicorn being tested, there are few enhancements for cataloging, yet the testing requires some investment in time to ensure that existing functionality is not broken. This led to a broader discussion of investing time as a beta test partner with SirsiDynix versus work on newer projects such as DiscoverLibrary, DiscoverArchive, and new digital collections.
- Unicode (not on original agenda).
- The discussion of functionality that is really needed led to a statement that Unicode is the next major functionality that would provide substantial benefit to the patrons. Already we have authority records with alternate headings in vernacular scripts, such as CJK, that are showing in Webcat as junk characters (like comic book cursing). Nancy thought that these “search also under” headings are showing in the vernacular/Unicode script in DiscoverLibrary. Given that Stanford took several years of intensive work to implement Unicode in Unicorn, the suggestion was made that perhaps we could implement Unicode in DiscoverLibrary faster and with fewer resources devoted to implementation than doing so in Sirsi Unicorn/Webcat. The group agreed to study a few bib records to see how DiscoverLibrary handled the scripts, if at all.
- DiscoverLibrary: update on new collections.
- Mary Charles reported that Global Music Archive was live in the production version of Discover Library early this morning and then disappeared. Dale told her it was scheduled to be turned back on later today. Language facets are still problematic with some codes showing instead of the language that the code represents. More fine tuning is needed. The Geographic facet that Mary Charles has been attempting to map is not quite ready for production yet. Jodie Gambill had provided some examples of various options.
- Dale Poulter is having substantial problems with the Serial Set records.
- There is trouble getting qualified Dublin Core out of DiscoverArchive. Progress is being made but slowly.
- Mary Charles said that another issue being debated was a FRBR question from Tammy at ExLibris. Should both serial and book records FRBRize. Some of the debaters thought that no two formats should FRBRize, while others were leaning toward having larger Super FRBR groupings and thought that the Gone with the Wind book should FRBRize with the movie, for example. What levels of grouping are helpful to make the database cleaner?
- Mary Charles also reported that there was a yearly update of MeSH headings available from Marcive that she will have to pursue whether there is any money in this current climate to purchase.
Our next meeting will be Monday, April 13th.