The Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board met on 17th October 2017. My apologies for the delay in posting a summary:
Jane Daniels (Cardiff Metropolitan University) had produced a report for the Board about community interest in metadata memory. The Board’s discussion raised issues on the current capability of library systems and how metadata memory and bibliographic history conflate. There was endorsement of the value of investigating the issue further.
Our colleagues at the University of Sydney are experimenting with CCM Tools’ new MARC upload feature, as part of their pilot to assess the validity of the identification of their East Asian collections as an area of collection strength. It is hoped that a case study report will be produced in the New Year. The Board noted the value of pursuing overseas engagement to develop sustainable use cases for CCM Tools.
Service Updates:
- The new MARC upload feature mentioned above enables CCM Tools users to upload data in MARC Exchange format which is then de-duplicated against Copac holdings. This produces better results sets for Copac non-contributors in particular, consolidating their holdings against Copac data. The CCM Tools team have redesigned the user support pages on the website which have now been made live.
- There have been several reloads of data to Copac recently as well as ongoing work with NBK data. New contributors to the NBK will also be loaded onto Copac so that their data is visible as soon as possible.
- The Copac team are looking into developing a cataloguing interface in the next year or so following expressions of interest from smaller contributors and OA publishers.
- White Rose data analysis work highlighted some issues with de-duplication of very common titles in Copac. A new title index has been developed which is now based on the de-duplicated data. This is now working very well and has reduced the size of the database by 1 million records.
CM@ Hull: The collection management event hosted by the University of Hull was a great success with very high levels of satisfaction reported by attendees. Lessons for future events include: thinking carefully about the balance between break out and presentation sessions and assessing the value of charging which adds considerably to the administrative impact. The Board thanked Dawn Holland and the team at Hull for putting together a most productive event.
CM@ Edinburgh: the Board discussed various ideas for the next event which will be held in Edinburgh in June 2018. Planning is at a very early stage and we hope to report with more information at the next Board meeting in February.
WRC Collections overlap: colleagues from the White Rose Consortium provided an overview of their collection overlap project and the resulting report (available in the previous blog post) The report identified several valuable recommendations for the community. These included:
- Caution around export of data: institutions should understand fully the exact nature and content of their data exports.
- Metadata quality is a major issue which could benefit from sector guidance with the aim of driving improvements.
- Additional guidance is needed on how collection management tools work (particularly around matching algorithms).
The Board discussed how accurately catalogues reflect actual library holdings and agreed that there is a need to clarify the data that is excluded from exports by contributors to the new NBK. There was interest in the concept of identifying key metadata fields used for matching/de-duplication so that these could be a focus for efforts to improve quality. Areas of interest for further investigation are: quality of data and collection overlap. Formal thanks was given to the WRC for their study and report. It is clear that the report and its recommendations are very influential in other forums such as the National Monographs Steering Group.
Data quality interventions: Jisc is keen to support initiatives to improve metadata following on from the WRC report. The Board discussed various principles for any such initiatives including the need for transferable methodologies, addressing legacy data and appropriate means to enhance poor data.
It was a suggested that a ‘minimum standard’ flag could be applied to records in the NBK to raise awareness. However, we would not want to mandate standards as this would result in too much substandard material being excluded. The consensus was that the focus should be on higher level strategic work which will make a difference to the community.
National Bibliographic Knowledgebase Update: SCONUL, RLUK and the National Monograph Steering group have recently been briefed on progress. A key message to broadcast to the community is that the NBK is ready to accept data from all HE and specialist libraries.
The Board were given an update on contributors so far committed, the timeline for the Beta resource discovery interface and a draft participant framework which addresses the issue of services which are open to all, those for Jisc members and those for which some form of charge may be necessary. CCM Tools is incorporated into the scope of this work. Initially the existing Tools interface will be tested with the NBK data. There are no plans to develop a radically different interface but there will be improvements and developments to reflect improved functionality.
UKRR for monographs: an update was provided following a recent meeting of the National Monographs Steering Group. The impact of the WRC report (discussed above) on plans for a UKRR for monographs was discussed. It was suggested that errors in deduplication could be something the community lives with. Emphasis could be on storage solutions for the greater amount of unique items apparently in collections rather than addressing data quality. However it is important to consider any shifts in strategy carefully in the light of further work on data quality. The CCM Board concurred with this caution.
A.O.B: Next meetings are: Thursday 8th February and Thursday 21st June 2018.
