Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/16362
The Library Research & Innovative Practice Forum is an annual event in June featuring lightning talks, presentations, and poster sessions by UMD Libraries’ librarians and staff.
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Item Segregation in UMD Libraries and UMD Library Education in the Early 1970's(2021-06-03) Bradley, BenjaminThis presentation is an introduction to some research-in-progress, rooted in the Diamondback and the Black Explosion, that I would like to share on racial (in)justice issues affecting the University of Maryland and libraries that happened in the early 1970’s. The first story focuses on accusations from McKeldin Library staff and the library Equal Education and Employment Officer about discrimination library employees faced. The second focuses on the story of the Urban Information Specialist program in the School of Library and Information Services. The program, pioneered by James Welbourne, was a radical program that focused on developing black library leaders to serve in inner cities. The Master’s degree program didn’t even technically require an undergraduate degree and focused on site education rather than classroom and textbook focused programs. The program was controversial and only supported by the federal government, not the library school or the university. When the program stopped receiving federal funding, the school decided to discontinue with program which garnered student protests.Item Are we there yet? Electronic Resources Discovery in WorldCat(2020-06-26) Bradley, Benjamin; Guay, Beth; Hemsley, Erica; Wilson, Aaron; Reiss, RobinIn 2012 the UMD Libraries began implementing WorldShare Collection Manager to manage the Libraries’ electronic collections and to make them accessible in the Libraries’ discovery system, WorldCat UMD. The panel will discuss how our understanding of WorldCat Discovery (WCD) informs our work to make the Libraries' resources available to students, faculty, staff, and others who rely on OCLC catalog records for library resource discovery. Our discussion will: provide background information on WCD; discuss its advantages and disadvantages; highlight cross-departmental collaboration and workflows; and finally, discuss new work in response to the Covid-19 Pandemic, in particular, work to implement the HathiTrust Emergency Temporary Access Service, and to make undiscoverable and important electronic resources, such as the Adam Matthew Digital American Indian Histories and Cultures collection discoverable and accessible.Item Managing Metadata Overload: Automating E-Resource Workflows with Computer Scripts(2019-06-22) Bradley, BenjaminThis poster illustrates how I have incorporated three different computer scripts into e-resource workflows to manage the large sets of metadata used to provide access and discovery of the library’s electronic resources and increase the volume of the work. The poster will illustrate the three different workflows and provide screenshots of the computer code and the scripts in action. The first script I will present is the E-Resource Access Checker developed by Kristinia Sprugin which I have edited to meet my library’s needs and use to ensure our patrons are presented with functioning URLs to access an e-resource, cutting down on dead or incorrect links in our discovery system. The second script is one I developed in collaboration with collection development librarians to assist with making decisions about e-resources. The script enables a librarian to input a list of titles being considered for cancelation, and the script then uses the WorldCat Knowledge Base (WCKB) API to find the different means of access and their associated coverage dates, thus making is easier to get the information needed for their decisions. The last script automates batch searches of WorldCat using the WorldCat Search API. I use the script to harvest metadata to enrich publisher-provided metadata in the WCKB and to create new collections in the WCKB to provide access to e-resources which we couldn’t previously. The poster will help facilitate discussions about these kinds of innovative practices and facilitate collaboration on related projects.Item KBQuery's Got Your Coverage!(2019-06-11) Bradley, BenjaminKBQuery is a Python script I created that uses the WorldCat Knowledge Base API to automate batch searches of our holdings in the WorldCat knowledge base. The script outputs coverage information which can then be used to support collection management. For example, the script can be used on a list of titles under consideration for cancelation to understand what other avenues the libraries have to access the title (such as an aggregator database or from an open access source). The script can also search on list of entitlements to see if a titles are missing from the KB, so we can identify those missing titles and add them, providing access to those titles. My lightning talk will give an overview of the script, present some real-world applications for the script, and close by discussion some opportunities to further develop the script.Item Harvesting MARC Data with the WorldCat Search API(2018-06-14) Bradley, BenjaminThe Open Discovery Initiative (ODI) hopes for a world where all content providers openly share their metadata with all discovery service providers, but we are still far from that world. While libraries depend more and more on publisher-provided metadata, libraries are often left with poor quality metadata or sometimes with no metadata at all. In this environment, librarians need to develop web-scale tools to provide web-scale discovery and access. In this lightning talk I will introduce a Python script I have been developing which uses the WorldCat Search API to batch search and download OCLC MARC records which I use to harvest metadata to supplement publisher-provided metadata or to transform the records into a KBART file for ingest.