Enhancing E-Resource Records for Discovery Presentation

Editor's Notes

• #2: Good afternoon, I’m Carla Arbagey. I’m the electronic resources librarian at UCR, so I’m involved with just about everything e-resources for us, from licensing and acquisitions to maintenance, even cataloging. Libraries are spending more and more of their collection budgets on e-resources, and there are some really great e-resources out there. The problem is how to let our users know what we have – they can’t find it on the shelf in the same way they would print resources. We often market our e-resources through traditional means such as e-mail, flyers, LibGuides. What if we approach this from a cataloging point of view? How can we use metadata to better market our e-resources? I’ll be talking about how I use MARC as a technology to increase the discoverability of e-resources.
• #3: First let’s think about how our patrons search – they’re used to Google-style searching with keywords, or maybe they’ve dabbled in searching for and browsing subjects. Sometimes they know exactly what they need, such as the ISBN or title, and can find it easily. Let’s look more in depth at MARC fields that can be helpful when the patron doesn’t know exactly what they need.
• #4: First, let’s talk about note fields. I always like to include a 505 or 520 (or both) fields in e-resource records, particularly e-books. Why? Because these fields are indexed in our keyword search. They’re also really useful to the patron when deciding if a resource is what they need – by looking at the contents, particularly for edited volumes and anthologies, they get a better idea of what’s in the book. In the example here, you can see that the contents note has “Reconstruction Era.” This means that a patron doing a keyword search for Reconstruction Era Clothing would find this book – something that might not happen if the contents note wasn’t present. You can also create a contents note that will be indexed in your title and author searches by using the corresponding subfields. We found this useful when cataloging anthologies for our Eaton Collection of Science Fiction, so that you could search the title of a short story and see all of the anthologies in which it appeared. Keep in mind that you should only add these fields if they are useful, and only add useful content. These fields aren’t always suitable for things like textbooks, medical books, and reference works. I’ve literally seen dictionaries that have the entire alphabet listed in the contents. Other catalogers take the idea of complete contents too literally, adding things the Cover, Title, Forward and such in the contents. This is not useful for the patron.
• #5: In a cataloging class, I was told that we should try to limit ourselves to three subject headings, maybe five at the most. Why is that? It seems like a hold-over from card catalog days. I am a bit of a radical cataloger. I like to think of what might help the user find e-resources, and worry about strict cataloging rules later on. And since I don’t have to worry about the poor soul who is typing all those subject heads for the card, I don’t worry about limiting the subject headings. As long as they are relevant and would be useful to the patron, the more the merrier. I also don’t agonize over call numbers – although I do think e-books should have them for internal use purposes, they aren’t needed for collocation purposes. At UCR, we previously didn’t use call numbers for e-books, but now we use them without any cutters.
• #6: Another type of discovery is what I call internal use – how the library staff goes about managing e-resources and packages. Note that this is more useful in case you don’t have an ERM, or your ERM isn’t working for you. There are several useful things you can do with MARC to help. I’m going to talk about some of the local fields we use, but keep in mind that the MARC tag for your specific local fields could differ.
• #7: 793: First indicator is non-filing characters, second is type of added entry (we use a 9 to designate a local field, which prevents this field from being over-written or deleted when we get a record update in a batch load); subfield 5 is institution to which the field applies – we’ve used our OCLC code here. This is a great way to see from your catalog which titles you have in a package. Note: make sure your ILS is set to index this field as a title.
• #8: Two examples of how we use the 910 field: the first is for an individually-cataloged item. It has information that we can use to create review files/sets (depending on the terminology used for your ILS) and generate personal cataloging statistics. Can also be used for quality since you know who cataloged the record. Our cataloging department also uses this to batch update OCLC holdings every morning. Second is a code for batch loaded records, so we know where they came from.
• #9: As an internal use field, 856 can be useful as a last resort when trying to create a review file. For external use, it’s extremely helpful for patrons when you list the coverage dates for e-journals, especially if you have multiple links and coverage in a single record. In our ILS, we can also use HTML in this field to highlight important information for patrons. In this example, we had a lot of complaints that Oxford Bibliographies wasn’t working, but patrons were trying to access resources we didn’t own. Even though this information is elsewhere in the MARC record (599 holdings field), patrons don’t look there – so I added a note in the 856 where they would definitely see it.