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Cataloguing Practice at the IOE Library

By utnvmoa, on 9 February 2024

This post is about running a short course for colleagues on cataloguing.  I’ve written it to let people know what we offer, and to discuss too the benefits of sharing expertise for those giving as well as those receiving.

We started running introductory training courses on cataloguing in the IOE Library almost by accident.  Back in mid-2014 a member of staff working in Library Acquisitions in SSEES joined the ‘Peer Shadowing Scheme’, a brief joint IOE and UCL entity before the two institutions merged, and came to the acquisitions section of the IOE Library.  While with us, the shadower asked if he could see how we went about cataloguing too.  We showed him and gave him some to do.  The experience was very positive.  Our first student took to it so well he got a job as a cataloguer at LSE.

Since then a total of 21 library services colleagues have been through 28 courses.  Some have done both general and ebook cataloguing, some both those plus work on metadata for the IOE’s Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA).  Mostly this has been post-pandemic. In the chart below, LCCOS of course means ‘the rest of LCCOS not including the IOE’, just to be clear.  I make the distinction between IOE and rest of LCCOS simply to show how we’ve cast the net more widely over time. In addition to what’s on the chart, Tom Meehan (Head of Cataloguing and Metadata) has also been offering cataloguing practice courses and has seen 7 students (3 in 2022 and 4 in 2023). To find out what the boomerangs are doing on the chart by the way, you’ll have to read a bit further.

So what do we offer?  It’s not shadowing, it’s practice.  The student is given an introduction to the theory of cataloguing and its application here, shown an actual catalogue record or two, then given typically three items to take away and catalogue from scratch, plus a lot of links to documentation for reference.  A feedback session is scheduled on the practice records that result.  After another round or two of practice cataloguing and feedback, if the student wants to do more, we suggest they find items to practise on, then check the catalogue record to compare and if they have questions to ask us.

Those are the bare parameters but the course can be tailored according to what the student wants.  Some may simply want to know what cataloguing is and how it affects other areas of library work, others may have some items in their area of work which they want to be able to catalogue themselves with our guidance. Some may want to add knowledge and practice of cataloguing to their skill set for their own development (and their CV).  Some may even think they want to be a cataloguer, and others may just want an excuse to get away from their own desk for a while (it happens!).  All of the above is fine with us.

Three of the five of us in the IOE cataloguing team are directly involved in offering cataloguing practice.  Kristina Macdonald joined me doing this in April 2022.  She says she was motivated by wanting to gain confidence when explaining our work to colleagues, and a strong desire to demystify cataloguing which she feels is often a gatekept area of library work. And since last year Christina Egan has also been keen to offer an add-on course practising ebook cataloguing as well as our work managing the metadata for records on DERA. Christina cites her love of teaching as the main reason she wanted to join in – she says having that element to her role keeps her happy professionally. As her line manager, I’m happy about that! Plus there’s now Tom Meehan joining in too, and the three of us at the IOE and Tom all liaise on what we’re offering and how it works.

Five temporary staff have taken the course and three people (two of them temps) went on to take jobs either as cataloguers or involving a significant amount of cataloguing.  All three of those jobs were outside of UCL, but I can prove we’re not about providing an escape route: two who did the course and then went on to land a cataloguing job elsewhere, ended up a few years later getting cataloguing jobs back here at UCL. So that’s two boomerang students.  We don’t do the courses as a long-term staffing strategy of course, but well-trained new starters has turned out to be one of the benefits.

It’s also very good for us.  Having to explain what we do, how, and why, makes us think about our own practice, and all these new people coming in and asking questions gives us lots of fresh perspectives.  Those who’ve done the course and go back to their roles here in LCCOS will also have gained some understanding of our work and how it fits in or doesn’t with theirs, which can improve communication between different sections of the library.

A few years ago for a presentation I came over all Venn trying to illustrate how librarians feel about cataloguing knowledge (reproduced below).

How things might ideally be when library staff from other sections meet cataloguers.

 

How I fear they sometimes are.  (This will vary from individual to individual of course.)

I hope our Cataloguing Practice courses are helping bring those circles together.

Adding the Bain Graffy Film Collection to Explore

By Thomas P Meehan, on 12 December 2023

We have just completed a project to convert the Bain Graffy Film Collection metadata from a set of HTML pages on the SSEES website to MARC records on Alma and Explore. This means that the collection can now be searched alongside the other library materials and handled in much the same way as other video records.

What is the Bain Graffy Film Collection?

The Bain Graffy Film Collection consists of approximately 14,500 films on around 11,000 DVDs, Blu-ray discs, recorded discs, and VHS videos at SSEES Library. The collection was created, added to, described, and indexed for many years by Professor Julian Graffy and Cameron Bain, after whom the collection is named. Cameron Bain sadly died in 2014 but Julian Graffy still submits detailed records to the project.

Converting the Metadata

Professor Graffy submits records in Word format. For many years these were converted by Library staff, largely by Vladimir Smith Mesa, to static HTML pages, one for each physical item. While consistent, easily readable, and well indexed by separate index pages, these did not conform to a formal metadata schema or file format.

With the old server needing to be replaced it was decided to try to move the many web pages to some kind of database. We tried several methods including a web form, conversion to an Excel spreadsheet using python, and lastly conversion to MARC records using Marcedit software. Marcedit is commonly used in libraries- including UCL- for editing large numbers of records in bulk, especially ebook records, but is also capable of converting non-MARC data to MARC and performing powerful textual transformations.

The eventual process involved obtaining HTML and Word documents from Gill Long; each HTML file contained data for one physical item with one or more films on it. I then combined these files in Word so there were one hundred per file and passed these Vlad. Vlad did two important things to the Word documents: firstly, he made sure that every film- rather than each video or DVD- could have its own record on Alma; second, he marked up each element by prefixing the necessary line with a label, such as “Director: “. By explicitly marking up data, this made it much easier for any script to “read” the file and what each part of it meant. For example, it is much clearer in the second example what the title is without having to rely on it being formatted a certain way.

Example original HTML file Example Word file edited by Vlad

Call number: DVD-2000


STOLPER, Aleksandr
Dni i nochi [Days and Nights]

Mosfil´m, 1944; released 28 August 1945
Screenplay: Konstantin Simonov, from his story of the same name
Photography: Evgenii Andrikanis
Production design: Morits Umanskii, Sergei Voronkov
Music: Nikolai Kriukov

 

Call number: DVD-2000

Director: STOLPER, Aleksandr
Title: Dni i nochi [Days and Nights]

Production: Mosfil´m, 1944; released 28 August 1945
Date: 1945

Screenplay: Konstantin Simonov, from his story of the same name
Photography: Evgenii Andrikanis
Production design: Morits Umanskii, Sergei Voronkov
Music: Nikolai Kriukov

 

I then converted the word documents to a basic format Marcedit could read (.mrk) then used a number of transformations (essentially, fancy cut-and-pastes) to change the labels to MARC fields. In other cases, I could just use the formatting where it was consistent (e.g. a number followed by “ minutes” is obviously a running time which can be fed into a 300 field, and anything in square brackets in the title form a translated title that can be moved into a 246 field).

The initial MARC file in Marcedit The record imported into Alma.
=LDR  01604ngm a2200445 i 4500
=008  010121s1945####||#|||############vlxx##d
=035  \\$aDVD-2000
=245  00$aDni i nochi
=246  33$aDays and Nights
=264  \1$c1945
=300  \\$a1 videodisc (87 min.) ; $c 4 3/4 in.
=500  \\$aFrom his story of the same name.
=500  \\$aOriginally released in 1945.
=546  \\$a
=546  \\$aIn Russian without subtitles
=590  \\$auclbaingraffy uclbaingraffydvd20002099 mrcbaingraffy20221130l
=700  1\$aAndrikanis, Evgenii,$edirector of photography.
=700  1\$aSimonov, Konstantin,$escreenwriter.
=700  1\$aStolper, Aleksandr,$efilm director
Screenshot of Alma showing the record converted to MARC format

The records were converted to proper MARC format (.mrc) so they could be imported into Alma, which created holdings and item data at the same time. Importing them into Alma automatically makes them available in Explore:

Screenshot of the record in Explore

The Get It section invites students and staff to contact SSEES Library where they will be able to view materials on-site. They are not currently borrowable.

The indexes created by Julian Graffy and Cameron Bain have been continued and are still really useful for finding films by country of origin and by genre. These web pages have been converted by Chris Carrington on Drupal and now point at the Alma record instead of the individual web entries. They will be maintained by Gill Long using data supplied by Julian Graffy.

Searching for Bain Graffy Items

Bain Graffy items can be found in several ways. In Explore, include the tag “uclbaingraffy” in the initial search to only search items from the collection. This is the search offered from the collection’s home page. You can also use the Collection facet to narrow down to the Bain Graffy Film Collection.

Screenshot of a search in Explore with the Bain Graffy collection selected as a facet

The home page also contains the indexes created by Professor Graffy where users can browse lists of films by genre, country of origin, and date of production. The results link to the records on Explore.

Next Steps

The collection is still being added to and making sure the flow of data is maintained to Explore and the indexes is the most important activity. Due to the quick and partly automated way the data was imported, there is some tidying work to be done, which Vlad has already made a good start on. We hope also to make some improvements to take advantage of the more standardised data format, such as implementing authority control, adding coded language information, or genre headings.

Changing “Pers” in Journals Call Numbers

By Thomas P Meehan, on 14 December 2022

A lot of journals at UCL have typically been classified in the library alongside their respective book collections using the abbreviation “Pers” for “Periodicals”, e.g. HISTORY Pers or GEOSCIENCE Pers. Although convenient and short, it has not always been clear to either students or even library staff what “Pers” meant. There has long been a wish to change this to something like “Periodicals” and the Explore Advisory Group gave the go-ahead to this being done. I have now run a job on Alma to change call numbers so that they read as, e.g. HISTORY Periodicals or GEOSCIENCE Periodicals. I hope this is clearer for everyone who encounters journal call numbers.

Screenshot of Explore showing three call numbers ending in "Periodicals"

Screenshot of Explore showing three call numbers ending in “Periodicals” for the journal Nature

While this job was being run, I took the chance to change UNASSIGNED Alma Locations to match the appropriate Library and alter the type of call number to “Other” to match most other local classification schemes in Alma. Call numbers with “PERIODICALS” in all-capitals have also been changed to “Periodicals”.

I know that there are still a number of anomalies to sort out, including journal holdings records where some minor coding errors caused them to be excluded, UNASSIGNED holdings where the call number does not include “Pers” or “Periodicals”, as well as a number of books- especially in the Main Library- which lack items and are also UNASSIGNED.

Thank you to Laura Sapsford in particular for help, advice, and a large amount of groundwork that was needed to sort out the UNASSIGNEDs in particular.

Liberating the Collections at UCL

By Rozz Evans, on 19 June 2020

As signalled in Ben’s Liblist message of 11th June 2020 we wanted to share a bit more detail about the work that has already happened in the area of ‘decolonising our collections’ and plans to develop and build on this work. There is a lot of activity in this area across the library and archives sector, many colleagues have attended events nationally related to this topic and there is a high level of interest and commitment to this area of work across the service.

Back in November 2019 a meeting was convened for all academic support staff interested or already engaged in themes around “decolonising” collections, at subject or site level, to consider the scope for activities in Library Services. The response was huge. We considered terminology and agreed we’d give this work the title of ‘Liberating the Collections’ so that it would complement the existing ‘Liberating the Curriculum’ work that UCL has undertaken. We also felt that the unintentional mis-use or misappropriation of the terms ‘decolonising’ or ‘decolonisation’ could be problematic.

Colleagues shared examples of work already being undertaken including:

Reclassification – recent projects

Art Reading Room, UCL Main Library (photo courtesy of Liz Lawes)

Tom Meehan (Head of Cataloguing & Metadata) spoke about a project initiated by Liz Lawes (Subject Liaison Librarian: Fine Art, History of Art, Film Studies, Small Press Collections) for the MX section of the ART collection, to change the classification of non-Western art from purely alphabetical-by-country to a logical arrangement using Garside’s standard geographical table. This followed on from a student enquiry and meant that African art in particular could be more effectively organised and less marginalised. The project involved mapping the former classmarks for 2000 items to new ones (in this case also recalculating Cutter numbers), making the changes to Alma holdings records, and physically relabelling and moving the books.

Wojciech Janik (Area Liaison Coordinator & Area Liaison Librarian for Russia, Ukraine, Belarus & Eurasia) shared details of similar reclassification work at SSEES library, undertaken to create new categories for materials from former Soviet republics which have been independent countries for almost 20 years. These had continued to be classified within the Russian collection which is politically problematic. There was a lot of interest in this work and it even resulted in a donation of books from the Georgian Ambassador.

Reading lists – modelling good practice

With planning for the new UCL East campus under way there is an objective to embed good ‘Liberating the Curriculum’ practice in new programmes from the outset. Hazel Ingrey (Head of Teaching & Learning Services) is working with academics to suggest inclusive, non-canon literature and viewpoints for the new reading lists that they will curate.

Change the Subject! – film screening at UCL

On 3 February 2020, Library Services co-sponsored the London premiere of this documentary, with UCL’s Department of Information Studies (DIS). The film narrates the story of a group of students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, USA, who challenged anti-immigrant sentiment as represented by the Library of Congress subject headings in the Library catalogue, and specifically the term ‘illegal alien’, used by academic libraries globally.

Open to attendees across the library sector, the screening was followed by a panel discussion where UCL was represented by Tom Meehan. The film is temporarily available to view https://www.pbs.org/video/change-the-subject-23nbpj/

Steps to Progress – facilitating and hosting a student initiative

Steps to Progress, UCL Main Library

In late 2018 a PhD student from UCL’s English Department approached the Library with a project he was developing, with the support of the Vice Provost International and other senior officers, to install decals of book spines to the stair risers leading to the Main Library that challenged existing perceptions of the literary canon and celebrated the diversity of the UCL community. Supported and enabled in liaison with library colleagues, the project came to fruition in early June 2019 https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/2019/06/05/steps-to-progress-2/. It has received considerable attention and plaudits from both UCL and external visitors to the space.

Eugenics Inquiry – supported and informed by Library Services

In 2018, UCL’s President & Provost Professor Michael Arthur commissioned an ‘Inquiry into the History of Eugenics at UCL’, led by Professor Iyiola Solanke of the University of Leeds. Library Services supported the Inquiry through the Director of Operations acting as secretary, and Special Collections staff assisting with identification and provision of evidence drawn from the archives and records materials we hold. Learning and insight from this process has been shared with Library Services staff in the Peer Review https://www.ucl.ac.uk/libnet/news-social/peer-review/archive-2020/issue-168-02-march-2020 on 2 March 2020. The articles illustrate some of the discoveries made and implications for how our collections might be researched and presented in future.

Sustaining the Liberated Curriculum – Special Collections project

The Special Collections team have long been involved in Liberating the Curriculum work, the most recent example being a funded project to develop enhanced resources for archival handling and exploration to support teaching in the BA (Hons) Education Studies at the IOE. The focus of the project was the preservation and digitisation of historical materials used for teaching about groups whose experiences have often been marginalised in historical accounts of education – in this case girls and the science curriculum, multicultural and anti-racist education in the 1970s and 80s and disability and special educational needs (SEN). Although they can be accessed in person, the resources are now available to UCL students on Moodle and have been used to develop teaching and student research in these areas over the past 2 years.

Next steps: Liberating the Collections Steering Group

It was agreed that there is a lot more that we can do and that we needed to establish a group to plan and oversee strands of activity across Library Services, aligned to our Strategy, UCL’s Liberating the Curriculum initiative and with reference to best practice in the library sector.

The group will be meeting for the first time on the 15th July to agree terms of reference and decide the priorities for this work going forward. The group will report to the Collection Management Advisory Group (CMAG) and connect closely with the Library’s Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Committee.

It will be co-chaired by Rozz Evans (Head of Collection Strategy) and Kate Cheney (Head of Site Library Services and lead for the Staff Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Key Performance Area).

Replacing Copac with new NBK Library Hub Discover

By Thomas P Meehan, on 8 July 2019

Further to my blog post of 5 February, Copac and a number of related services from RLUK and Suncat will no longer exist from 31 July 2019. They are due to be replaced by a new range of Library Hub services from Jisc, based on data within the National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK). Please take note if you use any of the following services:

  • Copac
  • Copac Collection Management (CCM) Tools
  • RLUK record downloading (z39.50)
  • Suncat

There are three “Library Hub” services, the most important one for discovery being Library Hub Discover, which takes over from Copac and SUNCAT and should have similar coverage. UCL’s holdings are now in this service, although I am undertaking a number of detailed tests and would appreciate any reports of missing or strange-looking records on Library Hub. Updates should now be weekly. You can restrict any search to UCL only, by putting “held-by:ucl” at the beginning of any search, e.g. this search for social media books by Daniel Miller. This should be useful for when Explore is unavailable. Real-time availability is not available on Library Hub Discover, but is planned.

The RLUK MARC record downloading service will be superseded by Library Hub Catalogue, a web and z39.50 service. I am currently looking at getting this set up on Alma and will send further information to relevant staff when this is ready.

The third service- Library Hub Compare– is not yet ready but is intended to replace CCM Tools and the SUNCAT Serials Comparison service. Further details will be provided when available.

Please note that all three Library Hub services are still being described by Jisc as “pilot” services but with the imminent retirement of Copac in particular it will be necessary to update practices and documentation.

More information

Jisc have provided a number of extra pages with information about Library Hub Discover, including a general About page, a more detailed FAQ, and lots of search tips in a Help page.

Feedback

Please let me know if you have any feedback, especially about how UCL’s data appears (or if it doesn’t). Jisc are also interested in getting feedback and you can fill in this questionnaire.

New NBK Library Hub to Replace Copac and Suncat

By Thomas P Meehan, on 5 February 2019

Copac and a number of related services will shortly be disappearing, to be replaced by new services from Jisc this summer. Jisc have been working on a new National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK) with a view to replacing a number of popular national library services, including Copac, Copac Collection Management (CCM) Tools, RLUK record downloading (z39.50), and Suncat. There are currently three “Library Hub” services planned, two of which now have a pilot interface available:

  • Library Hub Discover (search, to replace Copac). This is now available as a pilot with limited coverage to test now. There is a link to a feedback form on the Search page.
  • Library Hub Catalogue (record download, to replace RLUK z39.50). I anticipate this simply replacing the RLUK profile in the Alma External Resources search although there is a web interface too. This is now available as a pilot with limited fields and data, but this is for libraries that have contributed to the NBK, which we have yet to do.
  • Library Hub Compare (to supersede CCM Tools and the SUNCAT Serials Comparison service). There is no test version of this yet.

Jisc intends for all three to replace the existing services in July 2019. For more information about the Library Hub Services, see the About and FAQ pages. There is a little more information, including about the Compare service, in this post: Driving Transformation with the NBK – where have we got to and where next?. We intend to fully participate in the NBK so our records will be visible in the Library Hub services.

Visualising information

By C. Yogeswaran, on 13 May 2016

Those fond of cataloguing, classification, and visual education may be interested in exploring the Mapping knowledge: understanding the world through data exhibition which is currently on display at the Mundaneum in Mons, Belgium (last year’s ‘European Capital of Culture’). The Mundaneum represents Paul Otlet’s utopian vision for a world city housing the corpus of all knowledge, bestowing international organisation and dissemination practices.

I was fortunate to visit it in September last year – the space is wonderfully framed by the Universal Bibliographical System bibliographic index cards, and the exhibition explores Otlet’s visualisations of knowledge, as well as broader information-mapping praxis. If you won’t be adrift in Wallonia any time soon, check out the Mundaneum’s webpages which also proffer a captivating interactive infographic.

UCL Library Services has also recently acquired Alex Wright’s Cataloguing the world: Paul Otlet and the birth of the information age if you’re interested in reading more [record on UCL Explore here].

The exhibition remains open until 29 May 2016.

L’univers. L’intelligence. La science. – Illustration de la page 41 du traité de documentation, par Paul Otlet (1934), Commons Wiki.


Useful links:

Jewish Pamphlets Project Phase 2

By Andrew Watson, on 8 January 2016

In August 2015, Vanessa Freedman reported on the completion of phase 1 of the Jewish Pamphlets Project. A total of 4,000 rare Jewish pamphlets were catalogued, a conservation survey carried out and a pop-up exhibition presented. In addition, a full-page article about the project by Professor Colin Shindler appeared in the Jewish Chronicle.

Following this noteworthy achievement, we have been successful in obtaining funding to allow us to embark on the next stage of the project. In phase 2, we will be addressing the urgent conservation needs highlighted in the phase 1 survey. Over 1,000 pamphlets are in a fragile state with some 300 in very poor condition.

Jewish PamphletsAngela Warren Thomas and her team of conservators based in the Science Library will be carrying out this work to make the material safe to handle.

Following the conservation of the physical items, Matt Mahon will manage a programme to produce digital surrogates of the rarest and most fragile items. Not only will this reduce the need to handle the originals, it will also allow the material to be accessed globally via Digital Collections.

Lastly, phase 2 includes provision to catalogue the remaining pamphlets in collections of notable provenance, in particular the Montefiore pamphlets, to enrich, as Professor Shindler put it, this “treasure trove for anyone interested in Jewish history”.

Jewish Pamphlets Project phase 1 is complete

By Vanessa Freedman, on 4 August 2015

The first phase of the project to to catalogue the Jewish pamphlets at UCL Special Collections is now complete, with 4000 pamphlets catalogued in Aleph.

Pamphlet

The 4000th pamphlet

Some notable items from the project will be installed in the display cases next to the Donaldson Room in the Main Library on 13th August and will remain there until October/November, so do go and have a look.

Sadly this means saying goodbye to the project cataloguers, Dalia Maoz-Michaels and Peter Salinger (though Peter will remain at UCL as a volunteer). We held a small celebration after the Retrospective Cataloguing Team meeting last week to thank Peter and Dalia for all their hard work. They in turn thanked Andrew Watson, the project manager, for his guidance and support.

Peter and Dalia

Peter and Dalia

We are now seeking funding for phase 2 of the project, which will involve conservation, digitisation and further cataloguing – so watch this space!

Uncovering UCL’s Jewish Pamphlet Collections

By Vanessa Freedman, on 11 November 2014

Earlier this year we received funding for an exciting project to uncover a hidden treasure in UCL Special Collections: the Jewish pamphlets. The first phase of the project is under way and involves cataloguing some 4,000 pamphlets from the Mocatta and De Sola collections, as a well as a conservation survey and small exhibition.

Two project cataloguers, Dalia Maoz-Michaels and Peter Salinger, started work in July, and so far have catalogued nearly 1400 pamphlets. These mostly date from the 19th century and cover various subjects including the Anglo-Jewish community, anti-semitism, missionary activities focussed on Jews, and Jewish communities in 19th century Palestine.

The history and conversion of the Jewish boy, by the author of the “Twin Sisters”, &c. London, 1829. From the Asher Myers collection. Ref: SR MOCATTA PAMPHLETS A 106 SAN

The history and conversion of the Jewish boy, by the author of the “Twin Sisters”, &c. London, 1829. From the Asher Myers collection.
Ref: SR MOCATTA PAMPHLETS A 106 SAN

Look out for an article about the project in the autumn library newsletter. You might also be interested in this post on the Hebrew & Jewish Studies blog written at the beginning of the project.