Entries in the Category "Meetings and Conferences"
GODORT Fall Meeting
On Friday, November 14, I attended the Government Documents Roundtable of Ohio Fall Meeting at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. For the program, four veteran documents librarians had been asked to describe how they’d used print resources to find information that would have been impossible (or extremely difficult) to find using electronic resources.
Coleen Parmer gave a presentation about the Catalog of Public Documents. According to Ms. Parmer’s presentation, it was a print dictionary catalog that covered government information from 1893 to 1940. It was searchable by “personal names, governmental authors, subject, and frequently titles.” It was published concurrently with the Catalog of Government Publications (which was published monthly), but eventually, the government stopped publishing the Catalog of Public Documents. Some libraries still have the Catalog of Public Documents in their collections, and it is good for answering historical reference questions. One of the examples Ms. Parmer gave was a patron who wanted to know how much snow fell in Pittsburgh in January 1938.
Karen Kimber gave a presentation titled “Finding Population Data in Historical Census Publications.” She gave a list of questions one needed to ask when doing historical census research:
- Are the data available for the year you need?
- What was the publication pattern for the data for the year you need?
- When you’ve figured out what printed volume you need, how do you find it?
- When you’ve found the right volume, how do you find the data you need?
The only online resource that can help answer these questions is the Census of Population and Housing page on the Census Bureau home page: http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/index.htm This site only covers the census of Population and Housing. However, Ms. Kimber provided a helpful handout with a bibliography of print resources. GODORT of Ohio has requested an electronic copy of this handout to post on its website.
George Kline demonstrated how he answered a question where a patron wanted to find a Congressional hearing in which a relative had testified. Mr. Kline used the print subject index, which directed him to a list of Ohio hearings, which gave him the date of the hearing, which directed him to the correct volume in the print Monthly Catalog, which gave him the SuDoc number of the hearing he wanted. (Most of those present were aware that Lexis has a new product that will enable users to answer the question posed by Mr. Kline’s patron. However, that product is extremely expensive, and not all libraries would be able to afford it.)
Audrey Hall gave an overview of the CIS microfiche collection at the State Library of Ohio. She discussed its coverage and indexing for Congressional Committee Prints, Senate Unpublished Hearings, House Unpublished Hearings, U.S. Congressional Committee Hearings, Publication of the United States Congress, and Executive Branch Documents.
Encoded Archival Description Finding Aid Creation Tool Workshop (updated July 22)
Encoded Archival Description (EAD) is an encoding standard used to create finding aids for archival collections. OhioLink has a tool to facilitate the creation of EAD finding aids. These finding aids are submitted to the OhioLink Finding Aid Repository.
Deb has been working with OhioLink's tool for over a year, so when this workshop was offered at Kelvin Smith Library while Deb was at the AALL Annual Meeting, I offered to go and see if they discussed anything she didn’t already know.
Before the workshop, participants were asked to view the content guidelines at http://silver.ohiolink.edu/dms/ead/contentguide/index.html.
At the workshop, Cara Gilgenbach, chair of the OhioLink EAD Taskforce, demonstrated how to set up user accounts, create finding aids, and submit the finding aids to OhioLink.
The morning session mainly dealt with the "big picture," the part of the finding aid that pertained to a specific collection as a whole. Cara discussed which fields are required for a valid finding aid, and she explained the optional fields.
The afternoon session went into the component level of the finding aid. For those unfamiliar with the terminology, this refers to the individual items that are part of the collection, and it can be as detailed as telling the box and file folder number of each specific document. For the workshop, Ms. Gilgenbach created a finding aid for the Guide to the Ima R. Kivist papers (an imaginary collection), and this finding aid included all the optional fields, so users could see what the system could do.
When I did some component-level data input into Deb's finding aid, I found the system had some interesting idiosyncrasies.
- I found that the buttons to rearrange fields sometimes don't work as they should. After creating twelve "series" entries, I viewed a summary and they were not in order. When I attempted to rearrange them, the "move field" buttons moved them to random places in the list. I ended up creating a field, viewing a summary, saving, creating another field, viewing a summary, and saving. The trainers hadn't seen this before, so they made a note of it and took it back to the tech team. The tech team was unable to replicate the problem, and when I tried to get it to replicate, it didn't happen again.
- When I tried to enter a very long field name that contained quotation marks, it truncated the field name before the quotes. The trainers explained that the system had intermittent problems with some punctuation, and they were working on it.
- When I previewed the finding aid, the formatting looked horrible. The trainers explained that it was just a rough preview, and once the finding aid was submitted, the system would make the formatting consistent with the other finding aids in the repository.
- Finally, when I attempted to validate Deb's finding aid, it gave me an error message that did not tell what (or even where) the error was. Ms. Gilgenbach made a note of this and told me she'd get back to me. A few days later, a member of the tech team identified the problem as a list with a header, but no items, in it. When I deleted the list, the finding aid validated.
Overall, I think this was a helpful, well-run workshop, and when the glitches are worked out of this tool, it will be a straightforward, user-friendly piece of software.
NOTSL Meeting
NOTSL's Spring Program was titled Technical Services: Building the Infrastructure for a Library 2.0 Experience, and the main topic of discussion was OCLC WorldCat.org.
The first presentation, by Mindy Pozenel of OCLC, was titled "This Isn't Your Grandmother's OCLC: WorldCat.org."
She discussed how library websites are competing with sites like Amazon, Google, eBay, and YouTube. She explained that users want features like reviews, ratings, and lists, and users want to be able to make a contribution themselves. She described how Worldcat.org makes it easy for users to identify and locate copies of information they want.
Then, she showed how users can set up a profile and make contributions to Worldcat.org. Since I was taking notes on my notebook computer and the room had wireless, I set up a profile with the username SaraJean Petite and made a list of exercise books I own.
After that, she showed us how one could add a Worldcat link to one’s Facebook profile. I created a Facebook profile and tried it. Unfortunately, I can’t show my facebook profile to anyone besides my facebook “friends.” (If you wish to become one of my Facebook “friends,” my profile is at http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1303742345)
The second presentation, Putting a Local Face on WorldCat, was co-presented by Kathy Hughes of the State Library of Ohio and Rebekah Kilzer of OSU.
Both The State Library of Ohio and Ohio State University use WorldCat local as their library catalog. Worldcat local was described as a search interface that operates over a library's catalog. The library maintains its records locally, but at this time, the record that displays in the catalog is the one in the OCLC database. OCLC is exploring a Z39.50 version, which displays a library's local records. According to Ms. Kilzer, students liked WorldCat local because it was easier to use, but faculty and librarians' reaction was "Why change it? The old catalog works fine."
The main issue that came across when the presenters described the challenges of changing to WorldCat local was that it requires a clean database. Records need to have OCLC numbers in them, OCLC holdings need to be set, and duplicate records can cause problems. Items that are not in the OCLC database won't appear in a WorldCat local catalog.
The final presentation was "The Essentials and Non-Essentials: Just a Closer Walk with ILL". This was mostly demonstrations, and a few of the examples had glitches. The thing that impressed me most was that when the system worked, it was very simple for a patron to obtain a copy of an item he/she wanted. If the library had the item, a "request item" button would appear. If OhioLink, but not the library, had it, a button for an OhioLink request would appear. If no OhioLink library had it, a button for ILL would appear.
GODORT Meeting at State Library of Ohio
Keith Gilbertson of OhioLink spoke about the OhioLINK Digital Resource Commons (DRC). The DRC is a place where a library uploads its files (including associated metadata), and OhioLINK maintains the files and provides access in a site designed to look and feel like the library’s site. One can view the participating libraries’ sites at http://drc.ohiolink.edu. The PowerPoint slides for this presentation are available online.