This presentation was provided by Diana Brooking of the University of Washington during the 11th Annual NISO-BISG Forum, Delivering the Integrated Information Experience, on June 23, 2017 and held at the ALA Annual Conference.

1. Ingesting Metadata
Some Informal Remarks from the Library
Perspective
NISO-BISG Forum, ALA June 23, 2017
Diana Brooking
University of Washington Libraries, Seattle

2. Outline
• Background
• The effect of a variety of sources and standards on library staff
• Sharing metadata
• Matching records
• Some thoughts on the future

3. Background
From microform sets to ebook packages
• differences in stability of content (imagine a publisher comes into your library
with scissors to remove titles from microfilm reels)
• expectations for catalog access (public service librarians used to show
tolerance for the years it took for catalog records to appear for individual
titles in microform collections; now when a new ebook package is activated,
catalog records are expected to be there the same day)
• changes in library procedures
• vendor services also went through same learning curve (it took years for the
removal of titles or changes in urls to be reflected in metadata—still not
always handled well)

4. Background
Ebooks vs. e-serials metadata
• linking vs. discovery
• Full cataloging not as important for ejournals; the unit of discovery is mostly
the article; metadata used for link resolution (ISSN, title, coverage data)
• Full cataloging very important for ebooks; metadata used for discovery (but
some KBs still only supply ISBN, title)
• distribution of records
• eJournals: the CONSER file serves as a primary full-level MARC record source
for most commercially published journals and is widely distributed
• no equivalent of CONSER for ebooks: more reliance on publisher metadata
and local cataloging workflows

5. Variety of sources and standards
• I don’t want to ingest your metadata (at least, not directly)
• I want an integrated experience (librarians are no different than their
patrons)
• Too much DIY in-house: data wrangling, manual cleanup
• different procedures for each package/file (not efficient, cognitive load)
• size of file is large for UW (many titles, many packages)
• lack of tools ? too many tools? (I use 7 now); or not the right tools?
• escalating level of skills necessary to do the job

6. Sharing
• Distribution issues (any barrier to free flow of full metadata is a
problem)
• ExLibris Community Zone (KB): commercial entity, share with other ExL
customers only
• OCLC WorldCat and WorldShare: cooperative, share with the world
• But do publishers share everything with ExL? With OCLC? What may get lost
in the process?
• OCLC records vs. vendor records
• As OCLC member, we prefer OCLC records; vendor record are more difficult
for us to share and less likely to conform to library standards

7. Matching
• High quality metadata for ebooks often exists
• Is it shared? Can it be found?
• Lessons from OCLC KB (aka WorldShare Collection Manager)
• Inadequate matching algorithms (streaming audio matched to wax cylinders)
• Early on libraries told OCLC “any record better than nothing”
• Algorithm now much improved
• Identifying collections/packages (extremely difficult, extremely
important, not addressed)
• Standard identifiers possible?
• Consortial catalog (and beyond)
• control numbers of various kinds, another problem, ISBNs not reliable match

8. Future
• Adherence to a “traditional” library standards has not been easy in
the past (e.g., MARC, Provider-Neutral, AACR2)
• Libraries ingesting metadata from ever more sources with
proliferating number of standards—will this help or hurt?
• Linked data, a world with no records?
• data with no context?
• reconcilation, URIs from different sources
• more matching algorithms than ever?

9. Questions?
Diana Brooking
Cataloging and Metadata Services
University of Washington Libraries, Seattle
dbrookin@uw.edu