Jisc have convened four community data groups to look at issues and possible interventions that might be made to enhance the quality and efficiency of library bibliographic and holdings data (https://libraryservices.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2017/12/nbk-group). These groups are running from now until the end of July 2018, and will be reporting their finding and progress to the community through blog posts here.
Our First Challenge… NBK Support and Guidance: Past, Present and Future!
Our group was challenged with identifying the support and guidance materials needed by contributors to the NBK.
Through initial discussion around the data being contributed, we formed a shared theme of data past, data present and data future:
- Data past – Poorly catalogued records from the past that may be difficult to improve or deduplicate against the same items from other institutions.
- Data present – Records that we are working with now, many of which may be imported via automated procedures, from different suppliers and with varying levels of quality.
- Data future – Ways in which the NBK might allow us to improve previously catalogued records in batch, or how contributed records with missing or incomplete fields could be identified and workflows provided to improve the data.
Further to the above, during discussion with people in specialist roles at both existing and potential contributor institutions, it became clear that there are many different support levels required, spanning some very specific skill sets:
- The technical data import and export functions from LMS systems.
- Expertise in cataloguing and metadata management.
- Collection development and management activities.
- Management and leadership roles wanting to understand the benefits offered by the NBK and how they align with the strategic goals of the Library.
We aim to enable these different teams to work together, combining individual skills and workflows to realise these benefits.
We took the past, present, future theme and also applied this to the contributing institutions:
- Libraries that have previously contributed data to Copac, so have staff in the required roles who understand the benefits of contribution to NBK and likely have staff with the correct skills and knowledge to work with the NBK.
- Libraries that have not previously contributed to Copac, but have now contributed to or are in the process of contributing to the NBK.
- Libraries that as yet have not contributed to either Copac or the NBK.
Our support and guidance project will ensure that existing support materials and contributing workflows are identified and mapped to appropriate use cases, that current support needs of the community are analysed and a representative user group established, and we will provide a proposal for a long term online support space and ‘innovation zone’ to help support the NBK user community.
How can you help?
- We are working with three other groups, who are addressing different data challenges in relation to the NBK to co-create a survey for the NBK community. This survey will be available from early May and will be shared with contacts at your institutions. Please take the time to complete the survey and pass to appropriate colleagues for their completion too. The more engagement we receive, the better informed our work will be.
- Do you have skills and experience of working with NBK or Copac? We are looking for some potential ‘experts’ who may be willing to provide support to other institutions at some point in the future. Have you got experience of contributing NBK records from a specific LMS or even multiple systems? Would you be willing to help create some guidance materials? Get in touch – lee.blyth@northumbria.ac.uk
- Keep an eye on our blog posts and leave us your comments. We would like as much feedback as possible and would love to hear your thoughts on what type of support and guidance is required now and in the future. Please share these posts with your colleagues and encourage them to read and comment too.
Who are the members of the NBK Support and Guidance group?
Lee Blyth, Discovery & Access Librarian, Northumbria University
Annette Moore, Content Delivery Manager, University of Sussex
Emma Shaw, Collection Development Librarian, University of Roehampton
Kay Munro, College Librarian, University of Glasgow
Ruth Elder, Collections Management Specialist, University of York
