2024 Core Forum

Library staff play a particularly important role in the management process of electronic resources (e-resources). They work collaboratively with Electronic Resources and Metadata Librarians and assist with activations of incoming library materials, collections and databases maintenance, holdings synchronization across different platforms, and various clean-up projects. Due to the complexity of e-resources processing and management, the training, coaching, and mentoring of library support staff can be a challenge. This presentation will focus on training needs, methods, and techniques to develop appropriate skills for working with e-resources. Additionally, the audience will be introduced to influential training resources, programs, discussion lists, podcasts, and weblogs.

Discussions about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the library often cite cataloging and metadata creation as facets of library work that might benefit from adoption of these technologies. However, these discussions often do not consider whether or not AI is applicable to the current challenges faced by catalogers. With software vendors increasingly incorporating AI unilaterally into their products, it is important for librarians to effectively communicate their needs to these vendors so that new features align with the needs of the field. This presentation explores this topic by sharing current challenges related to technology encountered by print and electronic resources staff at an academic library and identifying which, if any, AI technologies would be appropriate to help address these challenges.

A wave of retirements, restructuring, and new hires amidst the Covid-19 pandemic gave way to a brand new technical services team at a small university's specialized, statutory college library. The new technical services department built their cataloging capacity from the ground up, with the goal that all team members would be expected to contribute to the library's original cataloging of its niche subject matter. The team dug in deep, working together to figure out an open and realistic training approach. With the support of the library's administrators and a philosophy to use any and all available resources, the technical services team combined modest professional development funds, discussion groups, consortia guidelines, mentoring, and out-of-box approache - such as auditing university classes in specialized subject areas - to meet their goal. This poster illustrates how a collaborative, creative approach to developing budding catalogers can bridge up-front barriers when it comes to introducing metadata work to brand new learners.

Metadata mapping for service providers is crucial as it enhances the discoverability of digital resources. Recognizing the common notion that 'any mapping would compromise metadata quality,' metadata mapping for service providers often involves translating specific locally developed metadata schemas into a standardized set of metadata, typically Dublin Core. This is especially challenging for metadata specialists and digital collections curators who need to strike a balance between facilitating discovery and meeting specific descriptive needs, particularly for digital collections originating from special collections. This poster will delve into the roles of metadata in supporting the discovery, access, and management of digital resources. It will then explore how library systems address these specific metadata needs by leveraging reusable metadata profiles. The poster will also offer guidance and strategies on using a defined set of metadata elements for service providers to enhance discoverability.

Open science initiatives can be intimidating, especially in established research organizations that are contract-based. To help internal stakeholders such as researchers and administrators become more familiar with open science principles, we utilized outside-the-box thinking. As a research organization connected to a state university, we must follow state document depository requirements for select publications. Using this mandate, we can create an environment of internal trust to create public trust. Internal stakeholders need to know that we are only sharing information that is not confidential or proprietary. The public deserves trustworthy scientific information to combat the misinformation that is widely available. By placing publications in an institutional repository, documents are webcrawled by the state and become immediately available to the public. Additional benefits include further visibility for the organization and the potential for new partnerships, usage statistics, and basic preservation of born-digital materials. With the upcoming changes to federally funded research requirements, getting stakeholders at research organizations comfortable with open science is imperative.

As linked data becomes more of a reality for the library community, OCLC has worked with libraries around the world to better understand how data, tools, and services can help integrate linked data into existing workflows and provide a clear path to transition to linked data. In this presentation, we will talk about insights from those libraries, the linked data work OCLC has done over the past few years to help with this integration and transition, and new linked data native tools and services we are developing for future library work.

Discovery products providing a single search interface to library collections have become industry standard in large academic libraries since their emergence in the late 2000's.  The process and parameters by which libraries select and evaluate these products is, however, neither standardized nor well represented in the literature.  This presentation begins to fill in gaps by discussing libraries' procurement processes and assessment methods including usability studies, drawn from both the literature and real life.  Presenters proceed by offering insights into how commercial discovery products use more standardized and proven metadata schemas like MARC, gleaned from mapping metadata for implementations of EDS (EBSCO Discovery Services) and Primo (Ex Libris).  It concludes by offering a preview of novel research using metadata to benchmark the precision and relevance of search results from proprietary discovery products, reinforcing the importance of maintaining the integrity and accessibility of legacy metadata.

In January 2024, ChatGPT Plus, Microsoft Copilot Pro, Google Gemini Advanced, and Claude Pro were four of the most popular Generative AI services available to the public. Each had subscription plans for around $20.00 a month. Meanwhile, at [LIBRARY], library student workers were creating basic metadata for scanned electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) from the 1920s-1990s. Due to time constraints, these historical ETDs only had basic metadata fields such as title, author, and date. How could the Oklahoma State University library add valuable metadata with limited staff and time? To solve this problem, [LIBRARY] student workers began testing these four, subscription-based Generative AI services to see if they could create reliable, accurate abstracts and keywords. To do this, student workers learned how to create accurate prompts to gather the best possible metadata, and then they learned how to evaluate the results with a rubric provided by their supervisor. This presentation will demonstrate how student workers used Generative AI to create abstracts and keywords for electronic dissertations and theses for an institutional depository. Then it will compare these four Generative AI options, evaluate their performance for creating metadata, and envision the future of generative AI and metadata.

Technical services librarians do not often participate in library instruction. At our university, the technical services librarian partnered with an instruction librarian and teaching faculty on a DEI grant to explore issues of information privilege with students in first-year foundation classes. We are investigating existing systems of information collection and dissemination, with the premise that such systems are often inequitable and potentially harmful. We are teaching students how data algorithms play into information distribution, the reasons for missing and marginalized perspectives in published research, and privilege in access to information. Our experiences with this grant showcase how metadata and collections librarians can share their expertise in electronic resource acquisition and collection development, as well as show the principles of critical cataloging in metadata and classification are relevant to patrons.  We will demonstrate how our instruction sessions have made students more successful in finding and evaluating information.

Genre/form terms describe what a resource is, while subject headings describe what a resource is about. While genre/form vocabularies have been available for use in libraries for years, they were often only used in special collections cataloging, in favor of using subject headings to provide genre/form information. As the use of faceted vocabularies has become more popular, so has the use of genre/form terms. The presentation will provide an overview of using genre/form terms in resource description today. Topics covered include the difference between genre/form terms and subject headings, benefits of recording genre/form terms, and how terms are recorded in various schema (e.g., MARC 21, Dublin Core, and BIBFRAME). A variety of genre form thesauri will be featured from Library of Congress Genre Form Terms to more specialized vocabularies such as Getty Art & Architecture Thesaurus, RBMS Controlled Vocabulary for Rare Materials Cataloging, and Genre Terms for Tabletop Games.

In 2022, our library migrated to a new library management system, joining an established shared implementation of Alma and Primo. Integrated resource sharing and document delivery was partially available to our user community at go-live, and expanded considerably over the following year, with the addition of a new network and new partners. In this presentation, we will share our experiences over the past two years. We will discuss challenges that we have encountered with an expanding resource sharing network - both high-level and "on the ground" for our User Services staff - and how we have worked to address them, as well as the benefits we have found. We will also share insights on how making our collections, especially our legacy physical collections, more visible has opened them to new users beyond our local community and supports the larger movement in academic libraries toward greater emphasis on sharing collections across institutions.

This study aims to investigate the alignment between a university (UW-Madison) library’s resources and the research outputs of the university’s scholars. By comparing citations in university publications with the library collections, we seek to quantify the degree to which the library supports academic research at the university. This analysis will involve comparing research outputs, extracting cited references, and assessing the library collections of overlaps and gaps. This study will rely on data from popular bibliographic databases such as Web of Science, and the library cataloging records. The project’s merit lies in providing evidence-based insights for library collection management, enhancing support for academic research, and optimizing resource allocations in university libraries. Findings will inform strategic decisions in collection development, ensuring resources are closely aligned with the university’s research needs. This endeavor will not only improve library services but also contribute to the broader scholarly communication field, offering a replicable model for similar assessments at other institutions.