Category Archives: Projects

– one-time, non-routine processing
– cleanup
– grant funded
– analysis

Metadata, Projects, Technology

The MADS and LSC Workflow Partnership

What is the MADS partnership and how did it start?

Kristina Thomas

MADS, which stands for Metadata and Discovery Strategy, is a department that works in Collection Services in Smith, Bay 10. I work in the LSC  (Library Service Center) as a Senior Library Assistant, where I’ve been for a little over a year. In the LSC, which is off campus, it can be a bit difficult to work with librarians a lot. We’re an offsite storage facility and we don’t see many of them. Dracine Hodges, who is the Associate University Librarian for Collections Services, and Jacquie Samples, who is the MADS department head, developed the idea of the workflow partnership. They worked with the LSC manager, Marvin Tillman, and the Associate University Librarian and Director of Financial and Facility Services, Jameca Dupree, to begin a workflow partnership that would help both the LSC and the MADS department.

As an employee at the LSC, I go over to Smith once a week. I work closely with the MADS team, particularly Jacquie Samples and Heather Baker, on record cleanup, checking records in CaiaSoft and Alma research/implementation. It’s good for our departments to work together because, over at the LSC, we do have a lot of experience in CaiaSoft. It’s also helpful for me because I’ve learned a lot about Aleph and Alma, the new software that DUL is migrating to. A full migration occurs in the summer of 2024. I have also been Alma certified and take notes/knowledge learned about Alma to my LSC coworkers. It’s been a mutually beneficial partnership as we continue to do record cleanup and transition to Alma.

How has MADS helped you become better in your position?

I’ve certainly become more knowledgeable during my time in MADS. I’m not accustomed to working in Aleph Cataloging and I had no knowledge concerning Alma. It was good to be on this team that directly works in Alma. It has helped to keep me on track as we continue the transition. I’ve also learned about several jobs that are completed by the MADS team in software that I didn’t have much experience in, so I’m getting to learn something else that is newer territory. I’ve also worked on record cleanup, assigned remote storage IDs and looked at collection codes, all in Aleph Cataloging. During my time here, I’ve also become more comfortable working with people outside of the LSC in CaiaSoft and I’ve really accepted my role and become more confident in explaining the software and being able to confidently answer questions. Being offsite in the LSC made me feel a bit distant from the other libraries, so constantly corresponding with these librarians has been extremely beneficial for me. I’ve also learned a lot about Alma. I feel more prepared for the migration than I would’ve had this workflow partnership never happened.

What were your challenges and what did you feel most confident about going into this workflow partnership?

I would say that I felt confident about everything that I have worked on in the LSC. This includes all our CaiaSoft functions. I had already met Jacquie and we had an informative conversation, so I felt comfortable because I use CaiaSoft every day. I felt comfortable being able to answer CaiaSoft questions or check items in CaiaSoft and look for item reports. I also felt comfortable in Aleph Circulation as these are both software that are used daily in the LSC.

My biggest challenge was that I don’t work on the same jobs that the MADS team works on. I also didn’t have the same knowledge. They work with Metadata. MARC fields and the terminology are different, so I felt a bit out of the loop. They are, of course, also very knowledgeable in Alma and I was really starting out so I didn’t feel as if I could contribute very much. I now believe that it has become mutually beneficial because I’m learning that our workflow connects both of our software and examines the relationship between them. We can both answer each other’s questions. They were also extremely nice when it came to pacing and stopping to explain things or answer any questions that I may have.

What have you enjoyed the most about this workflow partnership?

For me, it’s a great learning experience. I’ve learned a lot about other software that I’ve become more accustomed to using. I’ve been able to learn a lot about what they do in Metadata. I’ve gotten to work on the other side of Aleph that I never worked in before. As a librarian, it’s good to have knowledge of software, even if you don’t constantly use it. I’m confident that this knowledge will be beneficial as I move forward in my career. I also believe that it has helped me with professional communication skills. As for the LSC, it can be a challenge to uphold communication with other librarians at Duke. We don’t come into contact with them that often so coming to Smith has strengthened that communication and it broadens my interests as well.

What do you hope to achieve going forward?

I hope to learn as much as I possibly can. I’d like to be a well-rounded librarian. It’s important to take the time to work with other groups of people and learn their perspectives. I hope to continue working with the MADS group as well as other groups and librarians around Duke, and even outside of Duke. It’s been a great learning and networking experience. It will help me continue to grow and learn as a librarian. I also hope that my interest and knowledge continue to broaden, and more workflow opportunities are available for me in the future.

As for this MADS group, I hope to continue working with them, even after the implementation of Alma. I hope to be able to continue communicating with them and that this partnership opens up more opportunities here at Duke where I get to work with more people.

Collections, Projects

A Day in the Life: Alaina Economus

A person with short brown hair and glasses, wearing headphones, smiling while holding a cat
Alaina and Simon

Hello! My name is Alaina Economus, and I am the Slavic Language Resource  Description Intern in the Resource Description Department.

I came to Duke University Libraries in August of 2022, three months after graduating from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and simultaneous to beginning my MSLS at UNC-Chapel Hill. I majored in History and Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Studies as an undergraduate, and thought this position would be the perfect combination of my Russian language skills and my passion for library and information science. I interviewed for the internship in my dorm room at Smith (College) and thought how serendipitous it would be to begin a new chapter of my life also at Smith (Warehouse)!

When I first arrived at Duke, we had a significant backlog of Slavic language monographs that had been sent to us for original cataloging. Most of the items had not been looked over following their referral. With direction from my supervisors, Jessica Janecki and Natalie Sommerville, I spent the first couple of months looking up every item in OCLC Connexion and sorting them into different categories based on the language of the text and their “problem”; some had no record in OCLC, others had no call number assigned, and others had records with poor copy. Throughout this process, I was able to send many items to circulation, which cleared up a lot of much-needed space.

Now that the backlog has been sorted, I spend much of my time cataloging books from each specific category. This past spring, I decided to focus on Ukrainian-language materials with poor copy or no call number . It felt like something small I could do to support the promotion and accessibility of Ukrainian language and culture. I really value working with these materials, and hope that I am doing them justice.

This experience inspired me to conduct a collections analysis of the Ukrainian-language collection at Duke with Dr. Ernest (Erik) Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies. While it was originally just for a field experience course for my degree, I’ve been able to present the analysis at the TRLN Annual Meeting this past summer, and I’ll be presenting the full analysis at the Ukrainian Studies Conference this month. It has been such an enriching experience to work with these materials both for this project and for my work at Smith Warehouse.

Growing my cataloging skills has been one of the best parts of my experience in Resource Description. A year ago, I knew almost nothing about call numbers, subject analysis, or authority records. Now, I spend most of my time determining if the monographs I work with have accurate description that will make them accessible to patrons. It’s a big responsibility, but I love it! I am hoping to pursue a career in cataloging once I have completed my MSLS degree.

When not at work or in class, I enjoy reading, cross-stitching, traveling, and spending time with my friends, my partner Abbie, and my cat Simon (pictured).

Community, Metadata, Projects, Spotlight, Technology

A Year in MADS: Heather Baker

Heather Baker

In August, Heather Baker, Metadata Associate at Duke University Libraries (DUL), celebrates her one-year anniversary as a full-time member of the Metadata & Discovery Strategy (MADS) team in Collections Services. Before the pandemic, Heather worked as a practicum student, volunteer, and intern on the MADS team, and she now contributes as an official Duke employee. We asked Heather to share some of her experiences with us from her first year.

In what areas did you feel most successful this year?

I think I succeeded in becoming an integral part of the MADS team and taking on tasks so that my fellow team members could focus on time-sensitive projects. Fortunately, MADS has been incredibly supportive and offered their time and expertise whenever I have needed it.

If I had to pick one project that was the most gratifying, it would be a cleanup project that I completed of close to 1.5 million records. While it seemed daunting at the outset, I successfully tackled it and recently checked it off my to-do list. The project involved reviewing and updating internal notes on item records, and it gave me an interesting glimpse into the library’s history. Many notes offered a timeline of a book, for example, “this book was lost in 1977 but has been found.” Some notes were so old that it was difficult tracking down anyone who might remember what those notes meant. One of my favorite notes said, “mysteriously appeared on shelf.” That’s a mystery that will likely never be solved. Overall, I was able to make these records a little bit cleaner, which is always rewarding. I also enjoyed a few book hunts through the stacks—many records had conflicting data, and an item that displayed as “lost” to patrons was actually on the shelves. Those items are now back in the circulating collection.

What did you find most challenging?

What is so interesting about MADS is that we don’t concentrate on only one process or project. There is always something new to do, and it might be completely different from what I worked on last. My challenge has been reminding myself that I will continually be presented with unfamiliar tasks and that it’s okay to feel like a beginner even after I’ve been here for a year.

What areas did you focus the most energy on?

My focus has been on data cleanup when I’m not working on routine tasks. I enjoy the meticulousness of record cleanup, and it feels good to know that I’m improving the discovery layer with each record I touch. And data cleanup has been a great way for me to learn a variety of Aleph and Aleph Reporting Center (ARC) services. It’s fun to narrow down what I’m trying to accomplish, figure out the logic of how to do it, and then find a way to execute using Aleph and ARC. I’m not always successful the first (or second, or third) time, but I enjoy the trial and error, and I have a great support system in MADS with many decades of combined expertise.

Did anything surprise you about Duke, Collections Services, or your team?

I’m surprised at how the novelty of coming to work every day has not worn off, and I think part of the reason is because I haven’t met anyone in Collections Services who appears to not like their job. In my experience it’s rare for an organization to have staff who all seem to genuinely enjoy what they do, and it makes for a great atmosphere to work in every day.

What have you most enjoyed about working in MADS?

What I’ve found most challenging has also been what I’ve most enjoyed. The new experiences that I have weekly, if not daily, make for an exciting list of projects, and as a team we enjoy figuring out solutions to new problems. It has also been great completing some less urgent projects that the team had not been able to get to in the past. The small but mighty MADS team gets the job done!

Another thing that I love about MADS is that there is never a shortage of book recommendations. My to-read list has grown considerably since I started. And chances are that someone on the team has read whatever I’m reading, so there’s always someone to discuss it with.

What do you hope to achieve in the coming year?

I’m looking forward to helping in any way I can with the Alma migration. It’s exciting to make such a major change and have everyone learning a new system at the same time. I’d also like to focus on bringing the Collections Services Documentation Portal up to the standards of Duke’s latest Web Accessibility Guidelines. Thanks to a fantastic DUL Libraries Summer Camp session on writing alternative text and helpful Duke staff, I feel ready to do what I can to improve the quality of our Collections Services resources.

 

Metadata, Operations, Projects

Introducing the Bindery and Monograph Maintenance (BAMM) Section, Resource Description Department

When the new fiscal year started on July 1, two departments in Technical Services reorganized, and a new section was created within Resource Description. The section known as Shelf Preparation folded, with most related workflows moving to Monograph Acquisitions. (Follow this blog for more news on these changes soon!)

Corrina Carter and Lesley Looper (Team Lead) remain in the Resource Description Department, in the newly formed Bindery and Monograph Maintenance Section. Our new section name is descriptive of our broad work, but is a mouthful to say, so you can call us BAMM for short! (Think Emeril Lagasse or Bamm-Bamm Rubble.) You can email our new section at lib-bmms@win.duke.edu, or individually, as usual.

What BAMM will be doing:

Bindery: creating bindery and preservation boxing shipments, coordinating bound volumes (including monographs, serials, music scores, and items with digi-covers) to circulation points and the Library Service Center, overseeing the annual bindery budget, working with Continuing Resource Acquisitions on periodicals binding, and serving as in-house consultants for care and handling consultations and referrals to Conservation.

Monograph maintenance: cataloging queue maintenance, ALEPH reporting, declaring monographs missing, lost, withdrawn, or reinstated, updating locations and call numbers, resolving AskTech tickets, cataloging documentation review, and special projects (including outsourcing coordination and metadata projects).

Student assistants will also be an integral part of our section, helping us move materials through the section and department workflows, and on to DUL circulation points and the Library Service Center.

Corrina CarterCorrina has been working at Duke since 1988! She started in the Medical Center, and transferred to the Surgical Private Diagnostic Clinic (later called the Private Diagnostic Clinics) in 1990.  Corrina joined Duke Libraries in 1994, spending all of that time working with the Bindery, with several changes, location moves, and position upgrades along the way! One of Corrina’s favorite Duke memories is attending the DUL staff appreciation lunches (especially at the Searle Center), and getting to use work time to attend them. (Way back when, those lunches included humorous plays put on by library staff!)

Lesley LooperLesley has worked at Duke since 2001 (all of it in Duke Libraries), first in Receipts Management (starting as Library Assistant and later as Section Head) within the Acquisitions Department, and then in the  Cataloging Department (now called Resource Description). Later, she joined Shelf Preparation Section, before becoming part of the BAMM team. One of Lesley’s favorite Duke memories is attending the Rolling Stones concert in Wallace Wade Stadium in October 2005, and running into several DUL colleagues there. Lesley still enjoys visiting Wallace Wade Stadium for Duke football home games.

Collections, Projects

Making the Most of HathiTrust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS)

At the end of March, HathiTrust announced that one of the ways they are responding to the widespread closures of libraries is to launch their Emergency Temporary Access Service (ETAS) to allow the circulation of millions of digital copies of books now locked up in library stacks. Even those digital books that are still in copyright which under normal circumstances are not available. This is very exciting to those of us whose regular job duties include getting resources into the hands of patrons. Most of us in Technical Services have that mission at the core of our jobs, even though we do not work directly with patrons providing reference or instruction.

After HathiTrust outlined parameters of the ETAS with representatives from member institutions on April 2nd, 2020, an announcement went out to the Duke Community letting everyone know to look for the “Temporary Access” button on HathiTrust’s site, which gives us access to view one page at a time for in- copyright materials of which DUL holds a print copy.

Cory Lown and I quickly started communicating on how we could improve access for our patrons. Because the Hathi BibAPI is already in use for the Books & Media catalog for open access materials, we considered that avenue. Initially, there was not enough metadata available to us to reliably determine which digital books are available through ETAS. So, I started to strategize on how to add records to our Aleph ILS and communicated with our colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill to determine if their method would work for us. The number of records that would need to be created, though, was high at 1.3 million. That much new access for our patrons is great, but developing the process to get records in, and plan for getting them back out later when ETAS ended, meant that loading records into Aleph was going to be very time consuming.

On April 8th, HathiTrust published an article on their website, “How to Add ETAS Records to Your Catalog” which discusses three ways to provide direct links to the digital surrogate of an institution’s holdings. After reading this article, investigating what our peers were doing, and searching for the information needed to succeed, I realized all of the methods described meant that we had to have access to the HathiFiles database, the Overlap Report for Duke, and authentication credentials so that patrons would be prompted to login with Shibboleth to prove they are Duke people.

I reached back out to Cory to discuss which of the three methods we should use; ultimately, we decided that a combination of two was best for Duke. So, Cory updated how we use the BibAPI to harvest data from a local store of the HathiFiles and Overlap Report to generate URLs that are embedded in records as they are displayed in the Books & Media Catalog.

So, as of April 17th, in addition to being able to search for materials directly in HathiTrust, as they had since April 2nd, patrons now see “View Online” links to the ETAS items directly in our catalog. This temporary access means that approximately 38% of our print holdings now have links to HathiTrust materials (this percentage includes the open access links that were available before making this change).

Here is an example record that shows a “View Online” link: https://find.library.duke.edu/?utf8=%E2%9C%93&search_field=all_fields&q=D02036262L

With teaching, learning, and research activities now having to be done remotely I expect we will continue to look for ways to help our users gain the most effective access we can manage under the circumstances.

Metadata, Projects

Metadata Moves a Library

Library metadata does more than connect researchers to library resources.  It directs users to a specific building, to a specific floor, and leads them to a specific book.  With the renovation of Lilly Library fast approaching, Duke University Libraries Technical Services began exploring ways to leverage library metadata to facilitate the move of the collection from one location to multiple temporary locations.

For the Technical Services Team, preparing the Lilly Library collection for relocation translated into assessing its level of readiness, identifying and addressing gaps, remapping the collection to temporary quarters, and facilitating the return of the collection to its newly renovated spaces.

Addressing the Gaps

The good news is that the metadata, linking patrons to the Lilly Library collection, was in remarkably better shape than that of previous renovation projects.  Much of the credit for this state of readiness goes to the Lilly Team.  While there were a few issues that required our attention, the even better news is that much of this work could be automated.

Smart Barcoding

One of the questions to be answered was, “how many items in the collection lack a barcode?”  A review of an Aleph report revealed that only 6,000 volumes were unbarcoded.  Employing the use of smart barcodes would provide the most efficient means of addressing this task.  Unlike the generic barcode used at the point of cataloging, a smart barcode label contains a call number and a title. The application of the barcode is done by hand and the records in our ILS (Aleph) are updated in batch using an automated process.

With an Aleph report of unbarcoded volumes as our starting point, we contracted the services of Watson Label Products to produce the labels and supply a file with smart barcode numbers matched to our system-generated (“Dummy”) barcodes.  Once the file was received, we worked with Library Systems and Integration Support (LSIS) to develop a script to replace the system-generated barcodes with the smart barcodes.  The barcode labels arrived in sheets of 150 barcodes each, arranged in call number order, with bibliographic information to facilitate matching by the Lilly Team.

Smart Barcode Data File

smart barcode data file

 Spine Label Conflicts

In the process of organizing the data file for smart barcodes, another issue emerged.  A small group of Dewey call numbers appeared in the dataset for a collection that has no books labeled in Dewey.  The “In-Process LC” status in these records pointed to the LC Reclassification Project as the culprit.  From 2004-2008, DUL embarked on a project to convert 2.3 million volumes from Dewey to LC classification.  An automated process designed to copy the vendor-supplied LC call number from the bibliographic record to the holdings record had failed.

Typically, these problems are sent to Technical Services for resolution one-by-one.  At this juncture, was an automated approach even possible?  Some bibliographic records can contain more than one LC call number.  How could we proceed with confidence that the one selected in an automated process is an exact match to the spine label already on the book?  After confirming that every record with an “In-Process LC” status also contained a vendor-supplied LC call number, we turned to the Lilly Team to check the spine labels.  With their verification in hand, the next step was easy.  We used an existing Aleph Service to fix these spine label conflicts.

The method employed to solve this problem serves as a proof-of-concept that can be applied to all DUL collections that may have legacy Dewey call numbers in their holding records.

Weeding the Collection

The Lilly Team identified approximately 2,000 duplicates to remove from its collection.  Out of a desire to retain the copy in the best physical condition, they began the weeding process by retrieving and visually inspecting each copy.  The initial review of 160 books resulted in 80 to be withdrawn.  A file of the 80 titles was sent to Technical Services for records maintenance and the books were sent to Collection Strategy and Development for disposition.

Our Metadata & Discovery Strategy (MADS)  team suspected that library metadata could inform decisions about which copy to withdraw.  Would the number of times a book circulated correspond to its physical condition?   Could the manual selections made by the Lilly Team be replicated in the data?  To answer these questions, we produced a report of circulation history for the 80 pairs of duplicates reviewed by the Lilly Team.  MADS found that in 90% of the cases the items with the most circulations showed the greatest level of wear.

Remapping the Collection

From our perspective, we are not only planning on how to assist in moving the collections out of Lilly; we also have to focus on how to get it back post-renovation.  When we talk about the “Lilly move” we are really referring to the “Lilly moves” because not all materials are being temporarily located in the same space and they are all coming back.  Some materials will be temporarily at the Library Service Center (LSC) off-site repository, some in the Perkins stacks, current periodicals, or the East Asian Collection reference shelves; while others will be in a temporary space on East Campus that we’re calling the Satellite location for now. Immediately it became apparent that temporary location codes were needed for both moving the collections and controlling the display for patrons.

Cleaning-Up Collection Codes

In the process of setting up temporary codes for the Lilly collections, one of the earliest activities was defining what the Lilly Collections were, from a metadata perspective. Based on the collection codes in Aleph, we identified the number of materials in each code.  We discovered some codes were unused and had no items.  We also found a need to collapse multiple codes that served the same purpose, virtually transferring materials from one collection to more appropriate ones.

Part of that work was collaborating with members of the Lilly Team to collapse un-needed collection codes to the more correct codes.  In our clean-up we found out that there were codes that didn’t serve their intended purpose, so we removed them after updating item metadata.  After that, Metadata & Discovery Strategy Department (MADS) staff created temporary codes, determined how they should appear to patrons, and began changing metadata to the temporary codes so that the materials can be shipped. We worked with the Assessment & User Experience Department to adjust some of the public displays after the Lilly Team determined what those should be.  Once the building is empty, MADS staff will have updated all of the collection codes to temporary collection codes with batch processes.  This initial clean-up sets the stage for a more complete inventory.

There was some dissonance between intellectual collections, like the graphic novels, and the actual collection codes in use.  For example, we think of the graphic novel collection as a separate entity from the rest of the Lilly stacks, but there is no separate collection code (or shelving) for the graphic novels.  We just know they are there.  So, to get the metadata into shape so that patrons can see where things are during the renovation, and to be able to identify each collection later, temporary location codes were created for each sub-part of what we know as “the Lilly Collection.”

Throughout Technical Services, there have been a myriad of other changes to workflows in order to support the operations of the Lilly Library as it undergoes renovation.  Some of these changes are temporary, but others are a permanent reflection of our adaptability and flexibility.

Remember the first sentence in this post: “Library metadata does more than connect researchers to library resources?”  The Lilly Library renovation can now proceed with confidence that patrons can still explore its rich resources with ease.