Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Users and Uses, Research Libraries

Speaker: Bernie Hurley

Bernie Hurley is the Director for Library Technology at the UC Berkeley library.

Opening screen: ;-)

Title:
245 00
$aBibliographic control
$h[electronic resource]
$bA perspective from a Research Library
$cBernard J Hurley

Most of what bibliographic control is to libraries is: MARC.

"I'm desensitized to MARC. Or thought I was; I actually have some deep feelings about it. The title [of this talk] is a metaphor."

Metadata Needs for Research Libraries
- purpose of university is to confer tenure. This means: teaching, research, and publishing.

Metadata is used for
-discovery
-identification (also for inventory)
- delivery

How we index things:
2/3 of searching done in 3 indexes : title keyword, personal author, subject keyword.
Limit by "location" is the most frequent in the UCB catalog.

We are maintaining access points that are rarely used. This is a question of where we put our resources -- we should put more energy into keyword indexes.

MARC is not only encoding, but what we encode. MARC 245 has information about the title, but also information about the author, dates, medium form, version. This makes indexing complex, as indexes pull from individual subfields all over the record.

Display
simple displays use very few fields.
Our catalog displays 75 of the 175 MARC fields; it maps those into 27 labels. Display loses a lot of detail.

Delivery:
digital: 856 with the URL works pretty well; but the 856 also has lots of other information
Print: leads users to shelf

There is a mismatch between the richness of MARC and how we serve our users
1) we create many indexes, but catalogs use only a few
2) we have to dismember MARC to create our indexes (fields don't correspond to indexes)
3) the "meaning" of MARC is not being translated to library users.

Can we make it work harder? Maybe MARC isn't the *right* metadata. (Oh, horrors!)

It's expensive to create MARC records. It's expensive to create the MARC format. MARC sucks up all of the resources available for metadata creation. At Berkeley, the technical services staff doesn't have time to do metadata creation for digital library, so digital library is setting up its own metadata creation function.

The UC Bibliographic Services Task Force Report
- Enhancing Search and Retrieval
- Ranking; better navigation of search results; better searching for non-Roman materials
Recommenders; customization

MARC isn't flexible - it's hard to integrate new metadata into MARC.
Things like faceted browsing, full indexing, etc. are hard to do with MARC
We need to radically simplify MARC - we aren't using most of it. It could be used with other metadata, like DC, ONIX, LOM. METS already packages these together. It's not just MARC anymore.

Best quote:
"Research libraries are spending a fortune on creating metadata that is mismatched to our users' needs."

New services make the MARC mis-match worse; we can't fit new stuff into MARC.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Karen,
I just wanted to thank you for all your recent work in blogging this meeting. I've really appreciated it and have tried to get the same messsage out here. I manage a research library and archive in a largish national museum. We have to cope with a museum collection management system, an LMS, an archival collection management system and then a host of digitised document databases that record different metadata still. We are moving towards a new ground breaking ECM system that'll solve some problems and bring us federated search, but all these collection management systems and databases will still exist underneath it all, in addition to a new DAMS. I think I agree with Tim Burke's comments. Cheers,

Mal