The Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board met on 29th June. Here is a summary of our discussions:
- As usual an update on CCM Tools & Copac activity was provided. Highlights included:
- The CCM Tools pilot with the University of Sydney is progressing. We are working on providing a MARC exchange upload facility. Once established this functionality will be rolled out for use by other users who don’t contribute data to Copac, enabling them to obtain de-duplicated results sets featuring their own data.
- As well as the CM@Bodleian Libraries Book Storage Facility event, featured in the April blog post, we have run 6 ‘Introduction to CCM Tools’ events around the country which have been well received and reached out to many colleagues with little or no experience of using the Tools. A new series will be offered in the autumn.
- Adjustments to the ‘My library groups’ feature (announced via the lis-collection-mgmt email list) were time consuming. However the Board agreed that the changes improved functionality. Access for non-members of the UK Federation has been set up and tested. It will be rolled out to Copac contributors in September.
- A research report into low or non-use of the CCM Tools was presented and discussed. The concept and value of the Tools is recognised but there remains some confusion about accessibility for non-RLUK members which we will continue to address. Board members commented that the key to expanding use is for the Tools to be embedded in workflows and that this will only happen if they are perceived as supporting a business need in institutions.
- The Copac team are juggling maintaining data loads to Copac with increasing NBK activity. Various improvements to workflows are being implemented to help manage this, including a dashboard for new contributors to collate and update information about their data. It will be rolled out to more contributors as part of the NBK work.
- CM@ Hull Event, 7th September
Planning for this event is under way with a range of speakers interested in contributing. A sub-group will be convened to progress detailed plans.
NB Bookings are now open for this event at: https://cmhull.eventbrite.co.uk
- White Rose Consortium (WRC) / GreenGlass update
Latest news on the WRC collaborative collection benchmarking project was provided:
- Much work has been done comparing holdings results from GreenGlass and CCM tools. This involved close analysis of data through manual checking.
- The analysis has identified variations in metadata between the three libraries which have inhibited consolidation of records for comparison. It is only through looking at large amounts of data that the true nature of issues becomes clear.
- It is vital when embarking on any benchmarking project of this nature to fully understand the complexities of the data. Details such as changes in stock locations over years have an impact and the history of data creation and stock management have a big impact.
- Further testing will be done and a report will be provided to Jisc. The testing has been challenging but work has continued to understand the level of reported overlap between the libraries.
The report was followed by a discussion about the nature of bibliographic metadata, whether metadata was improving over time and how the NBK may be able to support work to clean up and enhance metadata. Levels of awareness of the issue are increasing in the community and the CMCAB will undoubtedly revisit it. Colleagues from the WRC will provide a further update at the next meeting.
- National Bibliographic Knowledgebase
An overview of key milestones and principles for the NBK was provided:
- The Beta service will be available in January 2018 and in January 2019 the full service will go live.
- Phase 2 of data loading is currently taking place including WHELF libraries, existing Copac contributors who have provided reloads and some new libraries.
- The NBK is essentially a database which will be the cornerstone for a range of Jisc services. These will include a cataloguing service and collection management tools through a login for Jisc members and a freely available resource discovery service. Other services may be developed further down the line either by Jisc or others making use of the data.
- For collection management, we will experiment with pointing the CCM Tools at the developing NBK database later this year to assess how this affects functionality. It is likely that the ‘live’ CCM Tools service will continue to use Copac data until 2019. Existing functionality will be maintained but we are hopeful improved functionality can be delivered both from improved data coverage and from enhanced data such as usage, circulation and condition/preservation data if libraries can provide it.
Discussion followed about the data sources which will be incorporated into the NBK and the fact that community consultation is a key part of the project and is incorporated into all phases. It was requested that Board members encourage colleagues to get in touch both about contributing data but also to volunteer for focus groups and provide feedback in specific areas.
It was confirmed that the NBK is a Jisc project and database which is being built on our behalf by OCLC.
- UKRR
An update was provided on Phase 3 of the UKRR. This will adopt the principle of a Principal Holding Library and non-members will be able to use the facility on a pay as you go basis. After Phase 3 the UKRR will be a ‘self-service’ facility enabling scarcity checking to take place. An update on plans for a UKRR for monographs will be provided at the next meeting following delivery of a feasibility report.
Dates for meetings in 2017/18 are: 17th October 2017, 8th February 2018 and 21st June 2018.
We welcome your comments and suggestions on the work of the CMCAB.
