CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group Conference and UKCoR RDA Day

This paper will reflect on the changes (for good and ill) in cataloguing, metadata and discovery that Alan Danskin has witnessed or contributed to over the course of his career at the British Library.

Although we live through a period of profound technical and societal change, it is important to consider the constants that underpin our work. Cataloguing may be carried out in the present, but it has to remain useful to future generations.

Maintaining the relevance and quality of what we and our predecessors have achieved is an ongoing process, particularly for a national library. Maintaining and developing capacity and capability are perennial challenges.

In this paper Alan will also attempt to look ahead, but his predictions should be treated with caution; he expected that he would have left the British Library and returned to Scotland by 1990!

In his role as Collection Metadata Standards Manager at the British Library, Alan Danskin was responsible for the development, implementation and application of bibliographic standards and metadata quality.

Prior to joining at the British Library in 1987, Alan worked on retrospective conversion projects and the service desk at Edinburgh University’s libraries before obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Library & Information Science from the College of Librarianship Wales (CLW) at Aberystwyth.

His first role at the BL was as a cataloguer in the British Library Catalogue Conversion Project, which resulted in the successful conversion of over 4 million printed catalogue descriptions into MARC format. He then moved into legal deposit selection for the Science Reference Information Service, before overseeing the relocation of SRIS Acquisitions from London to Boston Spa. In 1992, Alan re-joined cataloguing as Authority Control Manager. He has worked in metadata ever since by leading or participating in a number of collaborative projects.

Alan is a longstanding member of the Metadata & Discovery Group (MDG) and its precursor, the Cataloguing & Indexing Group (CIG); he served on the CIG committee from 2001 to 2016, including a number of terms as Chair. He has also served on various national and international standards’ bodies including: MARC Advisory Committee, IFLA Permanent Unimarc Committee, IFLA Standing Committee on Bibliography, Joint Steering Committee for Development of RDA, European RDA Interest Group (EURIG), UKCommittee on RDA (and its predecessors), BSI Identifiers and Metadata Committee, BSI Terminology Committee, Editeur Board, and JISC Library Hub Community Advisory Board.

Would you like to re-energise your metadata skills, re-enthuse your colleagues by demonstrating the power of metadata, and re-vitalise discovery of your unique content?  Then this session is for you!

Supporting this year’s theme of “Re-discovery” Ruth Elder and Helen Williams will introduce their recently launched Wikidata Thesis Toolkit, a document which aims to reduce the development burden for other institutions looking to establish a Wikidata thesis project.  Ruth and Helen will showcase the value and impact of a Wikidata thesis project at each of their institutions, inspire the audience to get hands on with Wikidata through the live creation of a Wikidata thesis item, and demonstrate how SPARQL queries make use of your metadata.

We hope that this session will be foundational in developing a growing community of practice among UK metadata experts who are interested in developing Wikidata work and sharing experience with one another. 

This presentation will cover the challenges of cataloguing Bengali script material at the Aga Khan Library, and the most recent workaround techniques in use at the Library to make the titles discoverable.

Bengali material is part of the Aga Khan Libary's backlog, which was purchased in 2008 with the help of a PhD student. Since the Library had a policy of ensuring that all non-Latin scripts should include the original script in the record, they struggled to find the best way to input Bengali script into the catalogue record that would display correctly in the OPAC back then.

Over time, the Library had no one else to work on the books, as it was quite challenging to find a cataloguer that could catalogue the Bengali books. However, as Unicode is now developed quite well to enable display of Bengali characters on multiple devices, and also OCR capabilities have improved greatly to recognise Bengali characters quite accurately, the Library has taken advantage of this and began cataloguing the Bengali material with minimal knowledge of the Bengali language and script.

The Library is still in the ‘testing’ phase, but confident that the data can be uploaded to make the titles visible and discoverable to users. There still are some display challenges in different applications or browsers, however, the Library hopes that this can be resolved in future developments and updates.

Finally, this presentation will comment on the status of dual script cataloguing of Bengali material in the UK.

Waseem Farooq read BA (Honours) Arabic with Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from the University of Durham (2002); MA Library and Information Studies at UCL (2012); MA Historical Research Methods at SOAS University of London (2014). Waseem began his career in librarianship as an Arabic Cataloguer and then Leading Library Assistant at the British Library in 2002. He joined the Aga Khan University in 2005 and became Librarian in 2010, with responsibilities for acquiring and cataloguing Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Turkish resources. He is currently the Reference and Instructional Librarian at the Aga Khan Library, London. Waseem is currently the co-chair of Middle East Libraries Committee UK (MELCOM-UK).

The Wessex Classification Scheme was created by healthcare librarians in the South West of England, and was loosely based on the US National Library of Medicine classification. The scheme is widely used in healthcare libraries across the UK, both inside and outside the NHS.

Although the scheme has gone through several revisions, there has been no major update since 2015, so the Wessex Classification Scheme Oversight Group was formed in September 2022 with the support of NHS England. The group aims to bring knowledge and skills from UK health library networks to improve the scheme, and also offers a chance for participants to develop skills in working with classification and subject indexing, and the opportunity to network widely. By forming a working group, it ensures the longevity of the scheme and shares the maintenance work more widely.

Initially, members were asked which parts of the scheme they felt needed updating the most and sub-groups were formed for LGBTQ+ issues and gender identity (the Pride sub-group), Ethnicity and Race, and Learning Disability and Neurodiversity (the LDN sub-group) as well as a smaller team working on ‘quick and simple’ updates.

The Pride sub-group undertook a review of the terminology and classification of items relating to the LGBTQ+ community, gender identity and gender affirming care and found that there were terms within the Wessex Classification Scheme that were no longer used or could be considered offensive, derogatory, or prejudicial. As a result of the review some terms were proposed to be removed completely (e.g. ‘hermaphroditism’) and other terms to be updated (e.g. ‘gender affirming surgery’ rather than ‘transsexual surgery’) using the Homosaurus as a guide in some cases. As part of the process, it was found that certain psychiatric topics were located within the same section as topics relating to sexual orientation and gender diversity. The sub-group believed this perpetuated a stereotype by linking these topics (e.g. paedophilia and incest) and so these were suggested to move from HQ to WM in the classification system. The Pride sub-group is committed to ensuring that the terms relating to the LGBTQ+ community are relevant and inclusive.

Work by the Ethnicity and Race sub-group revealed terms within the Wessex subject index that were either outdated, problematic or more appropriate to a North American context than to a UK one. In addition to terms used to describe ethnic groups, related topics such as immigration, traditional medicine, homelessness and health inequalities were also considered. Appropriate sources of information were identified, and terms discussed, before making recommendations to the oversight group.

The Learning Disabilities and Neurodiversity (LDN) sub-group is also looking at the language used in the subject index, and considering some broader changes to the classification schedules to bring together topics that are currently shelved in disparate areas of the classification. Some members of the LDN sub-group have lived experience of neurodiversity and are able to bring their experience to the work of the sub-group.

The speaker REflects on their experiences researching and writing the "Cataloguing" chapter in British Librarianship and Information Work 2016-2020, and looks at both the importance of, and the philosophy behind, recording the history of metadata creation.

The first part of the talk will give a brief introduction to the speaker and their role, and a short history of the publication in question. It will then cover the speaker’s methodology and its limitations, and highlight the difficulties faced in tracking down information recorded publicly only in ephemeral or regularly updated websites. They will also touch on writing style and the challenges of writing from a past perspective, given the current pace of change.

The second part of the talk will look at what the speaker learned from the experience, and what benefits a chronicle of the recent past can provide for the future. They will explore attitudes to change and the passage of time, and the role of recording history in making sense of life. Finally, they will think about the relevance of recording history in our specific field – how updating subject headings for inclusivity needs to be recorded to understand past injustices and changing views, for example – and the loss of detail if changes are recorded at a high rather than granular level.

Jason Curtis (he/him), Librarian, Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust and lead for the Wessex Classification Scheme Oversight Group. Jason has been the site librarian at the Shrewsbury Health Library, a busy NHS library serving healthcare students and staff at a district general hospital, since 2006. As well as managing the book and e-book collections, he is the lead for e-resources, the website, current awareness and information skills training. More recently he took on the national lead role for the Wessex Classification Scheme Oversight group, supported by NHS England. Having used the Wessex Classification Scheme for a number of years, he is excited to see it updated and kept relevant for UK healthcare practice, as well as making it more inclusive.

Philip Keates has worked in academic libraries for more than ten years, at various institutions in Cambridge, Brighton, Bath, and London. Metadata has been his primary focus throughout this time, but his varied roles have covered numerous areas – particularly scholarly communication, but also subject librarianship, film, frontline support, research data management, and, briefly, curatorship (managing Sussex University Library Cataloguing department’s popular "Things Philip found whilst shelf tidying" display). His current role involves supporting researchers with Open Access publication and self-archiving, and, as an occasional treat, a bit of cataloguing or discovery layer wrangling.

Metadata plays a key role in describing and enhancing archival collections. This presentation covers the standards, metadata elements and tools chosen to describe two unique archival collections at Solent University Library. Using the International Standard Archival Description (General) (ISAD (G)), as a framework for the creation and management of archival descriptions, EAD as a serialisation format and the Jisc’s Archives Hub Editor as an application, the archival works of Philip Mackie and Ken Russell were described.

A decision was made to comply with ISAD(G)’s mandatory elements such as Reference code, Title, Name of Creator, Dates of Creation, Extent of the Unit of Description and Level of description. Other metadata elements were also identified to record context, provenance, and access points. Because of this work, the library saw noticeable increase in the interest of its archival collections both within and outside the university.

This presentation includes a step-by-step explanation of how the Archives Hub Editor was used to describe the works of Philip Mackie and the works of Ken Russell which includes scripts, photographs, scripts, correspondence, and other documents.

In 2021, the joint USA, Canada and UK Cataloguing Ethics Steering Committee published the Cataloguing Code of Ethics. The document is a community response to clearly articulated needs for a code of ethics addressing the specific responsibilities of cataloguers and metadata managers engaged in creating, sharing, enriching and preserving metadata in an increasingly global and technology dominated cataloguing ecosystem.

The Code was created using the work of volunteers drawn from the cataloguing community of practice in the USA, Canada and the UK but also from Australia, Mexico and Israel. It is a concise practical tool for reviewing cataloguing policy and practice through an ethical lens and is intended for use by practitioners (regardless of where they are on their career journey and whether they work for the cultural and heritage sector or for the companies that sell systems, content or metadata); standards developers; students; and educators.

The ten statements of ethical principles embody a commitment to: understanding and meeting user needs; ensuring access to resources and metadata; promoting collaborative partnerships; critically applying standards; acknowledging bias; respecting the privacy and preferences of those who create and publish information resources; advocating for the value of cataloguing work and access to appropriate education and training to build a robust and sustainable workforce; promoting diversity, equity and inclusion; taking responsibility for decision-making and ensuring transparency in working practices.

It is intended that the Code will provide agency and empowerment for cataloguers and metadata managers, both now and in the future, as they seek to deliver solutions to ethical dilemmas that are part and parcel of day-to-day cataloguing work.

The session will include a short introduction to the Code followed by group work that will allow attendees to learn how to use the Code to devise practical solutions. Each of the ten statements will be examined under the broader topic headings of; audiences, tasks and hurdles; collaboration; and education, jobs and advocacy. The presenters will provide practical examples of ethical issues applying to each principle and invite attendees to contribute their own experiences and questions. Feedback will be gathered and shared for mutual benefit.

Dr Getaneh Alemu is a Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Solent University since 2014 and author of books and articles on metadata, including The Future of Enriched, Linked, Open and Filtered Metadata (Facet, 2022) and An Emergent Theory of Digital Library Metadata: Enrich then Filter (2015, Chandos). He served as a member of IFLA's Linked Data Technical Sub-Committee (LIDATEC) and served as the Program Chair for the International Conference on Metadata and Semantics Research (MTSR-2017) and as Workshop Chair for MTSR-2018. He is also an editorial board member of three LIS journals. In addition to his professional roles, Getaneh teaches a metadata and taxonomies module at Dundee University on a part-time basis. He received his Ph.D. in Metadata (Information Science) from the University of Portsmouth in 2014.

Jane Daniels was Bibliographic Librarian at Cardiff Metropolitan University until her retirement in April 2022. She catalogued a range of resources and also managed metadata received from system, content and service providers. She was also a member of the WHELF (Wales Higher Education Libraries Forum) Cataloguing & Metadata Group; the Jisc NBK Phase 2 Task & Finish Group for Metadata Quality & Standards - Plan M; and the Ex Libris Community Zone Management Group.

Jane is an active member of the Joint USA, Canadian & UK Cataloguing Ethics Steering Committee, who, working with the cataloguing community of practice, produced the Cataloguing Code of Ethics in 2021. Jane is the immediate past Chair of the CILIP Metadata & Discovery Group (previously the Cataloguing & Indexing Group.) Since retirement Jane has become a volunteer at her local museum and has become an advocate for the adoption of the Code in the wider cultural sector.

The British Museum and British Library share origins, and their prints collections overlap and duplicate each other. However, their differing approaches to cataloguing prints have obscured this. As of April 2021, the entire collection of the British Museum Department of Prints and Drawings (including around 2 million prints) has been fully catalogued, and the collection is used and celebrated worldwide. In contrast, the vast majority of artworks held at the British Library are either not well, or not at all, described in the BL's catalogues. The nation’s largest collection of prints therefore remains hidden, and consequently unknown, even to Library staff.

Over the last 18 months the British Library has developed a collaborative means of re-discovering their prints by interrogating, re-purposing and expanding upon British Museum print-level metadata, from online and printed sources. Staff are now able to upgrade records for bound volumes held by the British Library, and for the first time are able to create rich metadata for each of the prints contained within those volumes. As well as exploring similarities between the two collections, BL staff have also uncovered important differences, such as series of prints that have been coloured or arranged differently. This encourages a new way of discovering and ‘seeing’ prints in books and more widely in libraries.

This paper outlines the aims, progress and future of this project – how have staff been able to rediscover visual collections, and, looking forward, how can the BL encourage other libraries to do the same?

On a technical level, the speakers will outline how the metadata was extracted, cleaned and re-purposed; how the different standards and vocabularies used by the two institutions were aligned; and how the process could be incorporated into workflows which don’t rely upon specialist software or technical knowledge.

Collaborating with the British Museum has offered an opportunity to rediscover and reveal the British Library’s collections – from hand-coloured botanical illustrations to 16th-century etchings from a textbook on wrestling technique – at a speed and level of detail and accuracy that would otherwise be impossible. Staff have also been able to ‘rediscover’ the origins and purpose of British Museum materials when their items have been collected and/or catalogued without reference to the volumes they were once part of.

Felicity Myrone is an art historian and curator with a particular interest in 17th-19th-century works on paper, and their collecting histories. Since 2015 she has had responsibility for the prints and drawings in the printed books, maps and manuscripts collections of the British Library.

Mila Athayde graduated with an MSc in Museum Studies from Glasgow University in 2013. Prior to working at the British Library, she gained several years’ experience at the British Museum. She has a vast experience in cataloguing and documentation, collections management systems and historical research.

Victoria Morris specialises in metadata transformations – getting metadata from one format or system to another, including appropriate mapping of schema and translation of controlled vocabularies. She has a particular interest in machine learning and the application of mathematical techniques to library metadata.

The collections at Wellcome Collection are strong in visual culture, with over 250,000 prints, paintings, drawings, photographs, and objects. The collection also has a large ephemera collection, plus a considerable amount of visual material among the archives collection. The collections are currently catalogued in management systems for either the library or archives, and until recently there was no consistent approach to metadata creation.

We have developed a Metadata Framework to provide a foundation for the cataloguing of our visual collections, to ensure consistency in the data, regardless of the system they are catalogued in. This will support our work now, and will future proof the data should it move to a new library, archive, or museum system.

The Framework uses the approach of existing standards: CCO (Cataloguing Cultural Objects) from the VRA, mapping the ideas to the needs of Wellcome’s collections, and the requirements of Spectrum – ensuring our collections data is compliant for UK Museum Accreditation. Elements CDWA and DCRM(G) of were also incorporated. From this framework we are developing system specific cataloguing guidelines, suitable for different formats (currently MARC and ISADG).

The paper will look at the creation of the Framework and the issues encountered, discussing consistency for new metadata, dealing with legacy data, the need for transparency when amending existing records, and incorporating evolving approaches to diversity and inclusion. Using examples from the collection to illustrate how it is helping us to showcase new acquisitions and re-discover our historical collections.

The Metadata Framework is a living document, developing as we work with our collections. I hope this presentation will spark further conversation; I would value discussions with others working with similar items and issues in their collections.

In 2021, the joint USA, Canada and UK Cataloguing Ethics Steering Committee published the Cataloguing Code of Ethics. The document is a community response to clearly articulated needs for a code of ethics addressing the specific responsibilities of cataloguers and metadata managers engaged in creating, sharing, enriching and preserving metadata in an increasingly global and technology dominated cataloguing ecosystem.

The Code was created using the work of volunteers drawn from the cataloguing community of practice in the USA, Canada and the UK but also from Australia, Mexico and Israel. It is a concise practical tool for reviewing cataloguing policy and practice through an ethical lens and is intended for use by practitioners (regardless of where they are on their career journey and whether they work for the cultural and heritage sector or for the companies that sell systems, content or metadata); standards developers; students; and educators.

The ten statements of ethical principles embody a commitment to: understanding and meeting user needs; ensuring access to resources and metadata; promoting collaborative partnerships; critically applying standards; acknowledging bias; respecting the privacy and preferences of those who create and publish information resources; advocating for the value of cataloguing work and access to appropriate education and training to build a robust and sustainable workforce; promoting diversity, equity and inclusion; taking responsibility for decision-making and ensuring transparency in working practices.

It is intended that the Code will provide agency and empowerment for cataloguers and metadata managers, both now and in the future, as they seek to deliver solutions to ethical dilemmas that are part and parcel of day-to-day cataloguing work.

The session will include a short introduction to the Code followed by group work that will allow attendees to learn how to use the Code to devise practical solutions. Each of the ten statements will be examined under the broader topic headings of; audiences, tasks and hurdles; collaboration; and education, jobs and advocacy. The presenters will provide practical examples of ethical issues applying to each principle and invite attendees to contribute their own experiences and questions. Feedback will be gathered and shared for mutual benefit.

Victoria Webb has extensive experience across the GLAM sector, working in university and museum libraries in collection management, collection development, system procurement, metadata, and subject liaison. She has worked across the arts and sciences. Victoria currently works as a librarian at Wellcome Collection, which explores health and human experience.

Originally an OAI-PMH metadata application profile for open repositories in the UK, Rioxx version 2.0 has been widely adopted by repositories in the UK since 2016. Such support has enabled superior discovery potential for repository content owing to Rioxx’s evidenced harvesting and aggregation benefits [1]. Emerging from a version 3.0 candidate release, Rioxx: The Research Output Metadata Schema has recently been finalized [2]. Version 3.0 adopts a less UK centric approach to the schema and has introduced significant changes to the way in which research outputs are modelled and described. This includes superior capture of graph relations between other scholarly entities, harnessing greater use of persistent identifiers (PIDs), and reusing semantics from prominent vocabularies while retaining OAI-PMH as the principal data harvesting mechanism [3]. Most notably, the schema borrows aspects of the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) conceptual entity–relationship model to understand relationships between scholarly entities, particularly group 1 entities pertaining to works and expressions [4]. This, combined with better encoding of these relational associations within metadata, means Rioxx can make a useful contribution to the evolution of open scholarly graphs, including the burgeoning ‘PID graph’. 

This paper explores the modelling of research output expressions within repository metadata schema. Starting with consideration of the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) [5] and using the recently finalized Rioxx v3.0 schema as case studies, we consider the need for, and the importance of, superior modelling of scholarly works, particularly within open repositories, and consider some of the social-technical impediments to delivering schema which are more adaptable, work agnostic, and PID-centric. We demonstrate how such repository metadata can greatly enrich the formal PID graph thereby potentially unlocking new areas of scientific study; but also enhance user discovery of related research entities, most notably of research publication expressions, datasets, software, projects, and grants. The paper will also explore areas where FRBR thinking needs reactivating within repository contexts. Despite its general acceptance elsewhere, even with its limitations understood [6], experience within open repositories suggests that a commensurate conceptual shift remains elusive in repository metadata thinking and practice. 

References 
[1] P. Knoth and B. Notay, ‘UKRI OA policy requirements for repositories and how to meet them’, presented at the Jisc Workshop, 2021. Accessed: Apr. 14, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://www.slideshare.net/petrknoth/ukri-oa-policy-requirements-for-repositories-andhow-to-meet-them 
[2] ’Rioxx: The Research Outputs Metadata Schema’, 2023. Available: https://www.rioxx.net/
[3] G. Macgregor, N. Dowson, M. Eadie, B. Jones, P. Knoth, and P. Walk, ‘Enhancing discovery and enriching the scholarly graph with the Research Outputs Metadata Schema (Rioxx)’, in The 3rd Workshop on Open Citations and Open Scholarly Metadata 2022 (WOOC2022), Online, Oct. 2022. Available: https://doi.org/10.17868/strath.00082458 
[4] IFLA Study Group on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records, Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records: Final Report. The Hague: International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), 2009. [Online]. Available: https://repository.i fla.org/handle/123456789/811 
[5] J. Allinson, ‘Describing Scholarly Works with Dublin Core: A Functional Approach’, Libr. Trends, pp. 221–243, 2008. Available: https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/8522/ 
[6] E. O’Neill and M. Žumer, ‘FRBR: Application of the Model to Textual Documents’, Libr. Resources Tech. Serv., vol. 62, no. 4, Art. no. 4, Oct. 2018. Available: https: //doi.org/10.5860/lrts.62n4.176

George Macgregor is formerly a ‘Repository Manager & Technologist’ based at the University of Strathclyde, and from August 2023 ‘Assistant Director – Digital Libraries’ at the University of Glasgow. He works on repository and digital library developments, while also supporting institutional activities within open research, research discovery, and digital scholarship. He is Technical Officer of the UK Council of Open Research & Repositories (UKCORR), Chair of ‘Rioxx: The Research Outputs Metadata Schema’ Governance Group, and a member of the CORE Advisory Board. George has a PhD in Computer & Information Sciences from the iSchool at the University of Strathclyde, specializing in topics surrounding resource discovery in digital content environments.

How can we bring together the disparate discovery systems within libraries? How can we enhance the discoverability of archival collections which use metadata schema that are not compatible with a traditional library discovery system? This was the challenge faced by the speaker of this Lightning Talk when colleagues working in Special Collections and Archives approached her about adding records describing the library’s archives to the discovery layer (Ex Libris Primo).

The archives are physical collections only available for consultation upon request, and metadata describing the archives were stored in various spreadsheets. Archives staff had created a webpage for each collection, with a link to a request form, and a link to the archive’s record in Jisc Archives Hub, which functioned as a finding aid. The library needed to retain the rich EAD metadata supported by Jisc Archives Hub, but also needed to enhance the archives’ discoverability and reduce the need for researchers to start their search for archives either on the library website or on Jisc Archives Hub. The library wanted to unify archive discovery with that of traditional library resources, but as Newcastle’s LMS (Ex Libris Alma) is only compatible with MARCXML, a workaround was needed.

As well as enhancing the archives’ discoverability, the library wanted to bring the descriptive and instructional information – the Excel metadata, webpages, and links to Jisc Archives Hub and the request form – together within Primo. The speaker will describe how she decided that the best approach would be to create ‘signposts’ within Primo that pointed users to the webpages about the collections, which in turn would link them to the Archives Hub record and the request form. Firstly, an in-house schema was created within Excel for the archives team to use to transfer the existing Excel metadata into a format that could be represented by MARC tags. Once the metadata was standardised in Excel, a MARC template could be created in MarcEdit, translating the column headers in the spreadsheet into MARC tags, before converting the output into MARCXML.

As each archive record in Alma would need to display a link in the Primo record to the archive’s webpage, the records would need electronic inventory. An import profile was therefore set up to convert the URLs in the 856 fields of the MARCXML file into a portfolio record – this is the electronic inventory which is attached to a MARC record in Alma to enable linking from Primo to electronic resources. To ensure it was clear that the links were not pointing directly to digitised versions of the archives, the links display as ‘Further collection information and request form’. The result is that physical archives, with their own webpages, finding aids via Jisc Archives Hub and privately stored metadata, are now represented within the library’s main discovery system, with users able to discover the collections and request archival material without needing to leave Primo or start separate searches on other discovery systems.

Claire Delamore has worked with bibliographic data for almost 20 years, and has been in her current role of Metadata Librarian at Newcastle University for over 13 years. She manages the library’s ebook collections as part of her role, as well as working with colleagues within the Library Content and Discovery Services team to oversee and innovate metadata, discovery and acquisition workflows within the Library. Claire has recently joined the ALN Metadata and Linked Data CoP and the CILIP Metadata and Discovery Group as Advocacy Officer.

This Lightning Talk will present the Faceted Application of Subject Terminology, giving an overview of the scheme, its advantages and potential issues, and its practical implementation. It will demonstrate that FAST is an important development for those interested in Linked Data, and the ways in which it is a useful tool for discovery in any system.

Jenny has 30 years of experience in metadata creation, and her work role at BDS has a focus on policy development, the implementation of bibliographic standards, and training. She contributes to the work of several committees, including MDG, UKCoR, BIC Library Metadata Group, EURIG, and IFLA’s Catataloguing Section.

Managed and curated by the University of Sussex Library, the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection tracks the unfolding postcolonial story of international development over the last half century and provides an unparalleled resource for better understanding the history of evolving development interventions. Its value lies both in the breadth and scope of its contents, and the fact that the collection primarily derives from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the Global South, where limited funds, civil conflict, environmental disasters have often led to substantial archival destruction.

Amidst current concerns to decolonise development studies and librarianship, the collection contains a wealth of research data latent with potential to (re)generate and diversify global knowledge connections. Sourced by the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) primarily between the 1960s and 1990s, the collection comprises 250,000 items in 56 languages, from 150 (predominantly Global South) countries, organised under 19 distinct research themes. The material ranges from government and international agency reports and statistics; pamphlets and writings by civil society actors, research institutions and political parties; documents from participatory and community-based research; serials and related books.

Thanks to funding from the Wellcome Trust, over the past 3 years the material has been fully and inclusively catalogued, organised, and preserved. A dedicated website offering more information on the collection has been launched here, via which users can browse or search by theme, country or organization type.

To further enhance the discoverability of this unique global collection, an innovative proto-collaboration is developing between the Sussex Humanities Lab and members of the Library’s Collection Development, Systems and Teaching and Learning teams, to explore an alternative catalogue interface using a map-based data visualisation. The aim of this collaborative pilot project is to visually represent the geographic distinctiveness of the collection via a metadata mapping tool, a software prototype which plots all the BLDS collection items on a digital atlas, showing the density of items associated with any one place in the world at any given historical point on the collection timeline. The interface also documents the number of records that have no geographic location data associated with them on the catalogue, thereby highlighting ‘archival absences’, an important notion in decolonial discourse and epistemic practice.

This lightning talk will provide an overview of this emergent work in progress, highlighting perspectives on its far-reaching potential value form collection development, discoverability, teaching and research perspectives of metadata-driven librarianship. The team also has plans to explore the potential of data mining the bibliographic records and digital surrogates. By mining the data, it is hoped to automatically identify geographical locations and (perhaps) people’s names in order to augment the scope of the BLDS data by integrating a broader collection of relevant datasets and tools. Additionally, we will introduce scoping plans to develop the tool by integrating IIIF and TEI technologies with the mapping software, in order to incorporate dynamic digital surrogates of collection items, thereby bringing to life the material depth of meaning simmering beneath the surface of discovery.

Tim Graves is Systems Librarian at the University of Sussex, interested in the storytelling potential of data visualisation and the knowledge possibilities opened up by data mining and linked data.

Dr Alice Corble is Teaching and Learning Supervisor at University of Sussex Library, as well as AHRC-RLUK Professional Practice Fellow, whose “Decolonial Maps of Library Learning” research project incorporates utilisation of the collection and discovery tools covered in this presentation.

Danny Millum is one of the Collection Development Librarians at the University of Sussex. In a previous role he spent three years cataloguing the British Library of Development Studies collection which is central to this presentation.

Like many institutions, the University of Leeds began purchasing and subscribing to streaming video services during the Covid lockdowns, including the new offering of a British Film Institute institutional subscription. This BFI subscription offered an excellent selection, but there were barriers to discoverability and analytics with no vendor-supplied records and a high staffing cost for manual creation of individual records. Bare-bones ‘scratch’ records could be created quickly with the limited metadata provided by the vendor every month, but then had to be manually supplemented with copied metadata from the public face of the streaming platform BFI Player.

After about 18 months of this labour-intensive arrangement, a chance conversation with a colleague prompted a re-examination -- and rediscovery -- of our vendor-subscriber partnership. Instead of going to all this trouble to create records just for our institution, why not share them with other subscribers and get a discount for our own subscription?

A MarcEdit task list was developed that would enable creation of full RDA-compliant MARC records on the condition of BFI supplying a .csv file of comprehensive metadata from BFI Player. It was fantastic learning opportunity to develop skills in MarcEdit as well as update the team’s knowledge of video streaming cataloguing. Much of this learning was done through the Library Juice Academy’s video streaming and MarcEdit courses, as well as consulting the NISO video and audio metadata guidelines to ensure that the records we would provide to our community would be the most comprehensive possible. Just as we’d hoped, this new arrangement allowed the negotiation of a subscription discount for the University in exchange for sharing these monthly addition and deletion records with other subscribing institutions at no extra cost to them.

While the task list creation process was a technical challenge, the community impact of the new arrangement has great potential to benefit our fellow subscribing institutions. Subscribers are now receiving records for individual films rather than relying on a single platform record, which will allow for greater analysis of collection usage, direct reading list linking for fellow academic institutions, and improved accessibility faceting through the discovery layer with the newly generated 341 and 655 fields. This presentation will serve both as a practical demonstration of MarcEdit task lists and regular expressions to normalise and enhance vendor metadata -- including populating the 008 field with production date, runtime and language information, creating conditional 655 fields for Short/feature film and Fiction/nonfiction film, and adding enhanced accessibility fields for closed captioning and audio descriptions in the 341, 532 and 655 fields—and as an exploration of the potential for institutions with greater staffing power to facilitate community access to vendor content.

The presenters will discuss the metadata components of the National Library of Scotland-led ‘Archive of Tomorrow’ project, an 18-month multi-institutional collaboration focusing on capturing health resources online. Metadata work to be discussed includes the creation of a crosswalk to transform metadata produced in The British Library’s web archiving platform (ACT) into functioning MARC records, as well as subsequent enhancement work. Enhancements tested on the project included augmenting ACT metadata to generate authorised LCNAF headings; extending metada using Wikidata and VIAF, ISNI and LC reconciliation services; and evaluating the analysis of ‘automatic’ subject heading assignation at scale, experimenting with the National Library of Finland’s AI project ‘ANNIF’ as well as other bespoke approaches. In addition to outlining the development and status of this work, the presentation will touch on project challenges and limitations, and the presenters’ experiences getting to grips with new platforms while testing ANNIF.

In addition to discussing the technical elements of the work performed, other strands of the work relevant to conference themes - from performing authority control outside of traditional platforms to making progress with linked data - will be open for discussion/Q&A. Other areas of the project work suitable for incorporation in the presentation include:

• The incorporation of Content Advisories in records for websites that might contain sensitive content, relaying the findings of a literature review conducted by Mark and project Rights Officer Jasmine Hide.
• Our dependence on parallel projects elsewhere, with reference to development work at the BL, user communities online, and ANNIF and Wikidata use across the field.
• The dynamics of multi-institutional project work, in this case performed remotely by dedicated and seconded project staff, touching on learning new skills, reporting findings and seeking additional support.

Recent interest in persistent identifiers (PIDs) within the research and library sectors is bringing discussions about the adoption of standards – such as ISNI and DOI, and other ID schemes such as ORCID, Ringgold, ROR, CrossRef, etc. – to the fore, casting a spotlight on the PIDs already in use and their relationships to one another. In its capacity as a bridging identifier and a critical component in Linked Data applications, clearly ISNI has a major part to play in these discussions.

With a view to explaining the benefits of ISNIs for researchers, academic and scholarly publishers, institutions, funders, and other stakeholders – including information about ISNI’s centrally-managed database and the curation functions carried out by its direct data contributors – ISNI-IA continues to promulgate the ISNI standard within the research and library sectors, showing not only the importance of using ISNIs, but also the strength and quality of data that can be achieved when research identifiers operate collaboratively.

This presentation will be an opportunity for those in the library and research community to learn about progress with the ISNI standard to date, within the library, research and publishing sectors and beyond! In particular, attendees will learn about:

• What the ISNI standard is.
• How the ISNI standard interacts with other identifiers.
• The benefits of ISNIs for the research sector.
• The level of adoption across the sectors that ISNI represents (including the library, music, publishing, research and entertainment sectors).
• Upcoming ISNI projects (including the National Library of Finland’s ongoing project in collaboration with 5 prominent Copyright Management Organizations).

The principles surrounding Linked Open Data (LOD) and their implementation within digital libraries are well understood. Such LOD implementations may remain challenging, but successes are now well documented and continue to demonstrate the benefits of disseminating and enriching existing metadata with improved semantics and relational associations [1]. Often facilitated in machine-readability enhancements to metadata by harnessing serializations of the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and its reliance of URIs, these LOD approaches have ensured digital libraries – and similar GLAMR initiatives elsewhere – contribute to the growing knowledge graphs associated with the wider semantic web by declaring statements of fact about web entities. Within open scholarly ecosystems a growing use of persistent identifiers (PIDs) to define and link scholarly entities has emerged, e.g. DOIs, ORCIDs, etc.. The requirement for greater URI persistence has been motivated by several developments within the scholarly space; suffice to state that, when combined with appropriate structured data, PIDs can support improvements to resource discovery, as well as facilitate contributions to the ‘PID graph’ – a scholarly data graph describing and declaring associative relations between scholarly entities [2].

While the increased adoption of PIDs has the potential to transform scholarship, ensuring that these PIDs are used appropriately, encoded correctly within metadata, and that all relevant relational associations between scholarly entities are declared presents challenges. This is especially true within open scholarly repositories, from where many contributions to the PID graph will be made but – unlike many LOD contexts – from where the authority to assert specific relations may not always exist. Such declarations need to demonstrate reliability and provenance and are central to the interlinking of heterogeneous textual objects, datasets, software, research instruments, equipment, and the related PIDs these items may generate, such as for people, organizations, or other abstract entities. 

This paper will explore the issues that arise when levels of authority to assert are lacking or are uncertain, and review results from a related study exploring the ‘PID literacy’ of scholars [3]. If the PID graph is to demonstrate reliable growth and adequate relational depth, it will be necessary for scholars to interact meaningfully with PID centric systems and to demonstrate a level of ‘PID literacy’ in their (re)use and creation of PIDs, thereby supporting wider repository metadata initiatives designed to improve research discovery and any relational declarations to the PID graph. In other words, the creation of repository metadata – and scholarly object metadata more generally – is increasingly participatory, requiring scholars to declare relational associations so that repository systems in turn enjoy authority to assert relations. Our work suggests that digital scholarship deficiencies among scholars, including a lack of PID literacy, has the potential to undermine these metadata initiatives, with poor levels of understanding among scholars of why PID referencing is necessary, even for ubiquitous types such as DOIs and ORCIDs [3]. Low levels of scholars’ PID literacy is part of wider concern surrounding scholars’ open research practices, particularly surrounding transparency and reproducibility [4]. We consider some of the disciplinary differences to be observed between scholars and explore possible solutions. 

References 
[1] G. Candela, P. Escobar, R. C. Carrasco, and M. Marco-Such, ‘Evaluating the quality of linked open data in digital libraries’, J. Inf. Sci., vol. 48, no. 1, pp. 21–43, Feb. 2022, available: https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551520930951; https://hdl.handle.net/10045/109459 
[2] H. Cousijn et al., ‘Connected Research: The Potential of the PID Graph’, Patterns, vol. 2, no. 1, p. 100180, Jan. 2021, available: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2020.100180. 
[3] G. Macgregor, B. S. Lancho-Barrantes, and D. R. Pennington, ‘Measuring the concept of PID literacy: user perceptions and understanding of PIDs in support of open scholarly infrastructure’, Open Inf. Sci., vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 2023, available: https://doi.org/10.1515/opis2022-0142. 
[4] H. M. Sandy et al., ‘Making a case for open research: Implications for reproducibility and transparency’, Proc. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol., vol. 54, no. 1, pp. 583–586, 2017, available: https://doi.org/10.1002/pra2.2017.14505401079 

The West Midlands Evidence Repository (WMER) was born from a pre-pandemic recognition by managers of Knowledge and Library Services (KLSs) of eight NHS Trusts in the West Midlands region of the need for a repository. This was in order to replace existing provision, or recognition of national priorities or local needs to record, collect, and share research, as well as potential for sharing patient information leaflets or guidelines. Some managers and services had previous experience of repositories, as well as being part of a national pilot. WMER, however, represented a new start for all to work in collaboration to establish a new service. The consortium would enable sharing of both costs and experience.

Initially, different repository suppliers were investigated by the KLS that had had a long established repository, taking on board the experience of the group from the national pilot. The Atmire Open Repository platform was chosen as it met the consortium’s needs and had a proven track record of other collaborative repositories in the NHS. Financing was taken on by one Trust and the on-boarding was led in partnership between that Trust and the Trust that had undertaken the initial investigation.

With the initial on-boarding completed and the test server set-up, the group took a step back to ensure they worked together as a collaborative going forward. Collaborative work between the KLSs was facilitated by the formal creation of two groups, a Managers Group for overall approval and financial decision making and an Operational Group handling the setup and administration of the repository for the consortium. The Operational Group is led by the service with most experience of managing repositories and the lead of it acts as liaison between the two groups, with each group having representation from the eight organisations. Learning from other regional collaborations the FutureNHS site was used as a collaborative workspace and Teams as the main means of communication.

The setup of the repository was completed on time after three months. There was initially a steep learning curve for all, especially the Operational Group who undertook this process. The group identified key metadata and metadata standards for the repository, including the use of ORCIDs and the use of Wessex Classification as a controlled vocabulary. The setup process was facilitated by the collaborative nature of the project as the variety of experience in the group was a great benefit. It should be noted support from the suppliers was specifically related to technical support only.

The collaborative nature of the project also allowed work to be shared, and tasks were given to members to be undertaken independently. However, a downside of collaborative projects is that decisions can take longer to be inclusive. Fortnightly meetings of the Operational Group enabled the setup phase to be completed on time and this process allowed the repository to provide for a range of needs within the consortium, including defined policies and procedures on metadata standards, full text inclusion, and data management.

This collaborative project has been a success and WMER is now at the stage where it is up and running and being established as business as usual.

Since 2013, Resource Description and Access (RDA) has been the chief cataloguing standard used in the United States. In 2019, the RDA Steering Committee previewed a new version of the RDA Toolkit, which introduced substantial changes, such as replacing instructions with a series of options, adding new concepts such as “nomens” and “diachronic works,” and replacing the prior organisation with a broader intellectual framework. This revised Toolkit became the official RDA Toolkit in December 2020, with major cataloguing bodies planning to adopt it in the coming years. Some cataloguers have expressed concerns regarding the official RDA Toolkit, particularly around cost and training required to learn the new standard.

In response to these concerns, the RBMS RDA Editorial Group, a group of volunteers from the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Rare Books and Manuscripts Section, developed a new manual, Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (RDA Edition). DCRMR is informed by core principles of community and sustainability while employing open-access publication models and infrastructure. Designed in response to community feedback, it presents instructions in cataloguing workflow order using clear language while remaining aligned to the official RDA Toolkit and RDA element sets. The manual was approved in February 2022 in its first iteration and continues to be actively developed and updated. This presentation will discuss why the editorial group created an open and free manual; the process and tools for creating the manual, including the use of GitHub to publish a cataloguing standard; and outcomes to date.

On 23rd May 2023, the RDA Board announced that the original RDA Toolkit will be removed in May 2027. All RDA users will need to be prepared for transition to the official RDA Toolkit before then. As previously announced, a Countdown Clock will start running in May 2026, a year before the sunset date.
This paper will provide an update on the British Library’s plans for implementation of the new RDA Toolkit, following completion of the  RDA Toolkit Restructure and Redesign (3R) project. It will provide an overview of the timeline and scope for implementation as well as describing the training and documentation underpinning the implementation and the support available to other institutions for their implementation.

“From 1st January 2024, Adlib will no longer be supported or maintained by Axiell.” This statement acted as the catalyst for action, enabling the release of resources to implement significant changes to the BFI Reuben Library’s record structure, which in turn prompted a deeper look into our current cataloguing practices and future requirements. 

Upgrading to Axiell Collections will allow the library to implement new RDA more fully – we had previously adopted some aspects but not all – and, importantly, it will allow us to better align our data structure with that of the organisation’s other collections, making it easier to manage and making it compatible with further planned system developments. By the time of the conference in September we will be cataloguing to an under the bonnet Work – Expression – Manifestation – Item (WEMI) record hierarchy and new cataloguing guidelines.

Having watched all the webinars available, having read every piece of documentation which seemed relevant, having spent hours reading and re-reading the contents of the RDA Toolkit we are currently working on the last stages of our application profile whilst still debating issues around putting the theory into practice, especially in the area of aggregates and diachronic works. I do not suggest I have all the answers, far from it, but by sharing the story of our journey, that of a medium sized non-academic library of specialist mostly print collections, and illustrating it with practical examples I hope my presentation will be of use to others currently travelling a similar path.

Reports from scientific expeditions represent an important class of bibliographic object held by libraries of natural history institutions. They are, as is increasingly being understood, important as both scientific records providing crucial context for specimen collections, but also as historical documents of the history of empire and colonialisation. At the Natural History Museum, London (NHM) we hold reports and other documentation relating to many of the most significant expeditions from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. In this short paper I would like to draw out some of the issues faced when cataloguing these works from three angles: descriptive cataloguing, subject cataloguing, and authority control. I will consider questions of dependent and independent titles, ships as corporate bodies and other entity relationships, form/genre headings, geographic headings and LCSH.

This Lightning Talk will provide a quick update on latest progress with the now established UK NACO Funnel, which allows participating institutions to contribute to Library of Congress / PCC authority control. The presentation will include a brief summary of the purpose of the funnel, details of latest expansion, problems and solutions with data submission software, and further plans and collaborations

With hybrid working and a new LMS, we are revamping our in-house cataloguing training.  We are learning from our teaching librarians and using the tools we have, such as Moodle, to create cataloguing training that allows anyone with an interest to learn the basics, and making the best use of face-to-face time for putting those skills into practice.  Over the past eight years we’ve adapted and updated our in-house training, and I’ll also talk about how we decide what to teach colleagues, and how we try to make the best use of staff time to keep skills up when cataloguing is one of many competing priorities and shared across several teams.  Between staff turnover and COVID lockdowns and service changes, we are starting almost from scratch in building a pool of staff who can catalogue the material our suppliers can’t provide records for, which is an excellent time to take stock of what our cataloguing needs actually are, and advocate for the importance of creating and upgrading good quality records and why we need to build these skills in-house.