Donna E Frederick - Managing eBook Metadata in Academic Libraries: Taming the Tiger

First Edition

Donna E. Frederick

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ISBN: 978-0-08-100151-6

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015942334

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This book is dedicated to

My parents, Ted and Eileen Mazurek, who taught me the value of quiet toil and perseverance.

My professional mentor, Jill Crawley-Low, without whose help and example I likely would never have found a place in academic librarianship.

My husband, John Frederick, whose love, support, patience, and proofreading were essential to the completion of this book.

Figure 3.1 This is a sample of the type of metadata flows document the author uses at her library. The starburst represent discovery services or interfaces external to the ILS, which use the librarys MARC records; the rectangles represent processes within the ILS, which add new MARC metadata to the bibliographic database; the circles represent vendor-provided metadata, which is fed directly into the ILS; and the cylinders represent metadata, which is crosswalked from other collections or repositories. The arrows represent the direction or directions in which metadata flows

Figure 4.1 Example of a good spreadsheet

Springer is an example of an eBook publisher which offers a customizable MARC record-set generator for use by their customers

This diagram shows the process through which eBook vendors can use OCLCs WorldShare Metadata Collection Manager to deliver eBook records and update records to their customers

MARCEdit editing and metadata processing applications, available for download from http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads

View of Tools in the MARCEdit record set editing application. MARCEdit editing and metadata processing applications can be accessed through this MARCEdit window. MARCEdit is available for download from http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads

MARCEdit tools can be accessed via the Tools menu in the editor or from the menus on the MARCEdit window

Functions available on the MARCEdit Add-ins menu

Figure 9.1 University of California, Davis metadata flows diagram example

Table 4.1 This is an example of a simple table which could be used to track eBook problems which arent resolved in a timely fashion using readily available metadata

Table 8.1 Digital monograph metadata management inventory

Donna Frederick is the Metadata Librarian at the University of Saskatchewan. She has worked in various school, public, special, and academic libraries since the 1980s. The positions she has held range from circulation and childrens services to outreach, reference, instruction, management, and technical services. As an academic librarian, Donnas area of interest is the study of the impact of disruptive technologies on academic libraries. For the past 5 years, she has been working intensively with the eBook collection at the University of Saskatchewan. She has been building her expertise in eBook cataloguing, electronic resource troubleshooting, and platform functionality since 2010 and currently leads the Cataloging Group at the University of Saskatchewan.

For over a decade news reports, opinion pieces, social media discussions, and coffee room chitchat have revealed a diversity of opinion about eBooks among librarians, academics, students, and readers of all ages. Those opinions range from the extreme point of view that suggests eBooks will gradually make libraries irrelevant, to those who see eBooks as providing an inferior reading experience relative to the one provided by the reality of feeling the firmness of a well-bound book in hand and the smell of freshly printed pages. For years the various eBook debates remained a curiosity to the author. It seemed that while there was a certain degree of utility and novelty associated with reading an eBook, the author failed to relate to any of the seemingly extreme sentiments either for or against eBooks.

Upon reflection, a certain amount of ambivalence about eBooks on the part of the author should have been expected given her previous library experience. Her first library job was in a public library in 1984 and involved the checking and cleaning of vinyl records and repairing the sprockets on 16-mm films. Ever since records and 16-mm films became largely obsolete for public library collections and the resources were disposed of in one way or another, the author has been keenly aware of the impact that technological change can have on library collections and the types of work done by library employees. She has long accepted that new technologies will come along and some will stay and some will go. In addition, as technologies come and go the tasks that need to be done change and library workers develop new skills in response. In the authors 30 years of working in libraries there have basically been two constants: change and print books. EBooks, while clearly a change, simply didnt seem to represent anything all that remarkable relative to all of the other new formats and technologies introduced in libraries over the years.