Strategic Actions, Goals and Accomplishments

Metadata & Digitization Services: Key Activities and Accomplishments 

Owned by Nancy Turner
Last updated: Dec 02, 2020
24 min read

FY 19-20

  • CIP Partnership Program
    • After years of delays, we were finally able to begin our partnership with the Library of Congress to provide original pre-publication cataloging for all Temple University Press titles. From December 2019 to June 2020, we cataloged 19 titles, and we created 11 associated name authority records and submitted one subject heading proposal.
  • Digital Collections
    • Due to the move to Charles Library as well as the Covid-19 pandemic, our digitization unit was not fully staffed for much of the year, and for nearly half of the year, we did not have access to scanning equipment. Therefore, our scanning and cataloging statistics are significantly down this year compared to previous years. In the third quarter of the year (Jan.-Mar. 2020), we were back up to our full complement of student workers, continuing to adjust our workflows to the new digitization space, and were able to resume regular production levels, until the pandemic shut us down again.
    • Analytics demonstrate that the usage of our digital collections is significantly higher this year. During the pandemic closure, staff and student workers dedicated time to metadata enrichment and cleanup efforts, which we believe significantly improved access and discovery of digital collections. We believe the higher use of digital collections during this time also demonstrates the value of digital collections to scholarship, especially in a remote learning environment.
    • We continued to make progress scanning material for Bulletin Photographs, Oak Lane Day School, Temple News, Temple Yearbooks, Sci-fi Corpus Project, and YWCA materials for the In Her Own Right project.
  • PA Digital 
    • One of the primary activities of the PA Digital project this year was to replace our old aggregator software (DPLAH) with a new DPLA aggregation solution. Initially, we implemented Combine, which was developed by the Michigan Service Hub. We were able to use Combine for one harvest, but found it was unsustainable for our development team. Temple LTD staff developed an alternate solution using tools we already use for other in-house applications, such as Airflow and Amazon S3. As we had named our new front-end interface “Funnel Cake,” we gave the new back-end technology the name “Shoo-Fly Pie” to keep with the Pennsylvania food theme. With our new aggregator up and running, we began reprocessing contributor collections to move them from the old aggregator to the new one, a process that will continue through October 2020. MADS staff were able to work closely with LTD on this project and gained a great deal of knowledge about code development and deployment. We were also able put into practice previous training in order to use XSLT to create customized metadata transformations for each PA Digital contributor, as well as creating a new metadata application profile, resulting in more granular and better quality aggregated metadata that we were able to share with DPLA.
    • The PA Digital team at Temple hosted a meeting of the PA Digital Executive Board and other stakeholders to engage in a strategic planning process to build more sustainability for the project.
    • We created new Primary Source Sets (https://padigital.org/primary-source-sets/), including William Penn and the Early Quakers, History of Railroads in Pennsylvania, and Glass Plate Negatives. Two sets this year focused on an early grade audience, as one of our graduate student workers was able to bring expertise in Early Childhood Education.
    • We investigated the feasibility of a State Portal, which would provide a Pennsylvania-specific landing page and discovery environment for PA Digital resources, outside of the DPLA. As part of this work, we conducted an environmental scan of other DPLA hubs who have their own portals, and we conducted a collections gap analysis to determine PA Digital collecting strengths and weaknesses. After surveying PA Digital contributors, we determined that there was not high enough interest in this to move forward at this time.
    • PA Digital hosted numerous workshops and events this year, primarily developed by the Rights subgroup and addressing issues and questions around copyright. 
      • Copyright open office hours sessions
      • Copyright and Oral Histories
      • Determining the Undetermined: “Other” Rights Statements
    • PA Digital team members continued to serve on nationwide DPLA Working Groups:
      • Assessment: Rachel Appel (Co-chair)
      • Metadata: Leanne Finnigal (Co-chair)
      • Outreach: Stefanie Ramsay (Chair)
      • Rights: Gabe Galson
      • Technology: Chad Nelson
  • Move to Charles Library
    • MADS staff worked very hard on the move to Charles Library and were highly involved in the move in several ways:
      • Stefanie and Michael coordinated the move of all digitization equipment, including the specialized Quartz scanner, which required working with the vendor and was incredibly difficult and complicated.
      • Catalogers completed all ASRS “triage” before move. This included 11,574 books that could not be loaded into the ASRS because they were not in Alma. We also worked closely with Acquisitions and Access Services to handle rejected books in other scenarios (45,902 books total) in order to facilitate complete loading of the ASRS before the library opened. We cataloged a total of approximately 2500 retrospective titles this year both during and after the move.
      • We performed quality control on the ASRS loading throughout the move and also regularly afterwards, in order to detect missing items that were “found” during the move, as well as to ensure ongoing synchronization between the ASRS database and Alma.
      • We created item records for all new kiosk equipment (laptops and battery packs) as well as for over 1000 microfilm reels of the Philadelphia Bulletin so that they could be loaded into the ASRS.
    • Following the move, we re-established digitization and cataloging workflows in the new space, working closely with other departments as needed.
    • Following the move, we were able to use the ASRS to request items with only brief catalog records in order to retrospectively catalog them more fully. This was much more difficult to do in Paley where it was often difficult to locate these items on the shelves.
  • Covid-19 response 
    • During the Covid-19 pandemic closure, we focused our efforts on discoverability of our resources, particularly online and digitized resources that could be accessed remotely.
    • We performed a refresh of our Hathi Trust holdings in order to maximize the number of Temple-held items that could be accessed via Hathi Trust’s Emergency Temporary Access Service. The holdings refresh is a labor intensive process that is normally done once a year but hadn’t been done since 2018 because Hathi was revising their procedure. We also worked closely with LTD to ensure that these new temporary online resources were available in Library Search.
    • MADS staff and digitization student workers enriched metadata in CONTENTdm in order to improve access to digitized collections. We also worked with LTD and Communications & Marketing to try to improve visibility of digitized collections in Library Search and on the Library Website. • We loaded numerous new electronic resource records into Alma, thanks to temporary access agreements from vendors during the pandemic. We also corrected or removed thousands of broken links from our catalog and updated the coding of some URLs to optimize their discoverability.
    • We completed a project to backfill Alma with records for Temple electronic theses and dissertations so that all of these could be easily found in Library Search.
    • We replaced numerous catalog records with more accurate records with proper encoding so that they would link out properly to Hathi Trust and Google Books. We also supplied missing identifiers for records to support this same linking in order to provide more online access options for users.
    • We worked with Acquisitions to support alternate purchase models during the library closure, including a limited program to purchase print resources on demand and mail them directly to patrons.
  • Ongoing Cataloging
    • Total cataloging for all libraries was 19,537 titles, which is only 1987 fewer titles than last year, and only slightly below our 20,000 benchmark, which is quite good considering 3.5 months of closure from March-June. However, this total does include approximately 3,000 replaced/enhanced records during the closure, so new cataloging alone was closer to 16,000.
    • Most types of cataloging were down somewhat from last year, but there was an increase in outsourced Non-Roman language cataloging, thanks to many items found during the move to Charles LIbrary. There were also small increases in music scores, sound recordings, streaming media, and realia. We increased our cataloging of games for the LCDSS and created new documentation for cataloging procedures as well as genre terms for both tabletop games and video games.
    • MADS staff cataloged Special Collections resources in the Beth Heinly Zine Collection, Richard W. Ellis Collection, Artists’ Books Collection and Luis Gonzáles del Valle Collection.
    • Regular electronic resources loading was down from the previous year, but this was more than eclipsed by the large number of temporary access electronic resources that were loaded during the pandemic closure (over 150,000 titles).
  • Hathi Trust SciFi project with LCDSS
    • This year MADS worked on a cross-departmental project with LCDSS, SCRC, and LTD to make digitized books from the Paskow Science Fiction Collection available via Hathi Trust. The digitization team scanned several hundred books and kept track of title and page-level metadata. LTD worked with LCDSS to automate the generation of a digital object package complete with technical metadata and a manifest, based on the MADS spreadsheet. Matt Ducmanas identified corresponding MARC bibliographic records in Alma, added the digital object identifiers and normalized the records, then transmitted the MARC records to Hathi Trust. To date, 205 titles are now available in Hathi Trust: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Search/Home?type%5B%5D=all&lookfor%5B%5D=%2A&filter%5B%5D=htsource%3ATemple%20University%3A&ft
  • Marcive Comprehensive Notifications Pilot 
    • We partnered with our authorities vendor, Marcive, to test their new Comprehensive Notifications Service (CNS) for one year. This was an outgrowth of last year’s backfile metadata enrichment, and it ensures that our entire Alma database gets updated on a regular basis and that access points stay current. Marcive sent us bibliographic record updates in a batch each quarter. For the first quarter, we performed extensive evaluation of the records before loading them into Alma, in order to compare what Marcive was able to provide that Alma’s built-in authority control did not. We noticed many headings changes that Marcive had caught that Alma had missed, and so we decided to proceed with loading these records back into our catalog. For the remainder of the year, we developed new workflows for sending, updating, and loading back CNS records. We decided to continue using this service and will be presenting about our experience at the ELUNA Learns virtual conference.
  • CONTENTdm Linked Data Pilot
    • We were invited by OCLC to participate in their second major linked data project, which was to re-envision CONTENTdm in an entity-based linked data system. As long time users of CONTENTdm for Temple Digital Collections (digital.library.temple.edu), we are interested in any future improvements to the system, and it was an opportunity for staff to gain practical hands-on experience with linked data. As part of the pilot, we worked with OCLC to select 3 collections to transform into linked data. We evaluated the resulting metadata and tested both back-end and front-end interfaces for interacting with the transformed data. The pilot will wrap up in Fall 2020.
  • Digital Preservation
    • Digital preservation was identified as a key priority for the Libraries this year. We currently rely on the Isilon, a networked storage system supported by Temple ITS, for preservation. The Isilon contract was initially set to expire in 2020 which motivated us to explore alternative approaches that aligned with professional best practices. A working group formed in September 2019 to develop a charge and define short and long term goals for this complex work. In the Fall of 2020, the Isilon reached capacity, which affected the ability of staff to use the system. Group members focused first on cleaning up and organizing content on the Isilon before moving forward. When the group reconvened in the Spring of 2020, we defined a shared vision of digital preservation and planned a survey in order to review digital assets across the Libraries. The survey is intended to help us better understand the scope of content that requires preservation and the current cross-departmental practices of staff responsible for the management of this content. It is also a necessary step for the group to then evaluate potential preservation systems that will help us preserve digital assets for long-term access. Web Archiving • We continued to use Archive-It to capture websites relevant to Temple University and Special Collections Research Center. In the Spring, we made additional efforts to capture local organizational responses to Covid-19.
  • Discovery & Website
    • We continued to contribute metadata expertise to the Library Search and Library Website projects. This year, this includes improvements to the indexing of bound-with materials, transformation of harmful subject headings, browse prototyping, and incorporation of HathiTrust links into the library catalog.
  • NACO 
    • We continued to participate in the Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO) of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. While much of our NACO work is driven by local names found in Special Collections cataloging, this year we also performed NACO work for the original catalog records we created for Temple University Press via the CIP program. This year we created 71 new name authority records and 12 updated name authority records.
  • SACO
    • We took some steps this year toward being able to contribute to the Subject Authority Cooperative Program (SACO) of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Being SACO members would allow us to create proposals for new or changed Library of Congress Subject Headings. Interested TULUP staff participated in a self-guided training program, viewing 14 online sessions, each consisting of multiple modules. While our progress was interrupted due to the pandemic closure and other priorities, we do plan to continue training and review of the SACO manual so that we can apply for SACO membership next year.
  • Controlled Vocabulary Manager 
    • Rachel Appel conducted interviews among TULUP metadata stakeholders across multiple departments, including MADS, Blockson, SCRC, Scholarly Communications, and LCDSS to determine interest in and need for a centralized system to manage local controlled vocabularies. Based on these interviews, Rachel created personas and prepared a final report, which we will use to inform our development of a Centralized Metadata Repository in the years to come. (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Hex287XS-dB1cXEtvlhJCP-NleIpqkY_/view)
  • Elements 
    • We continued to work with Temple ITS and the TUScholarShare team to support Symplectic Elements, Temple’s research information management system. Rachel Appel worked with the College of Public Health and Klein College of Media & Communication to populate and review faculty profiles, provide Elements training to ITS student workers, and to map Elements metadata types to the AROFA (Annual Reports of Faculty Activity) system. Institutional Repository
    • MADS team members provided ongoing consultation regarding metadata mapping and application during both the soft and full launches of TU ScholarShare, and we advised on and tested the integration between ProQuest and Open Repository to automatically deliver electronic theses & dissertations (ETDs) to ScholarShare.
  • Strategic Steering Teams
    • Scholarly Communications: Rachel Appel
    • Communications & Outreach: Stefanie Ramsay
    • Collections Strategy: Holly Tomren
    • Community Engagement: Carla Davis Cunningham

FY18-19

Digitization

  • We upgraded our CONTENTdm site to the responsive version, which is more accessible and mobile-friendly. Using Google Analytics to track statistics, we saw an increase in user engagement through number of views, including new users, and users remaining on the site.
  • The analytics show us that our bounce rate, defined as the percentage of users who visited CONTENTdm and left without interacting with our content or navigating to another page on the site, dramatically decreased since upgrading the site. Prior to the upgrade, our bounce rate was at 50-61%, on average. After the upgrade, our bounce rate has averaged around 8%. This indicates that more users are remaining on the site for longer.
  • Our team completed five digitization projects this year: the Jacob H. Gomborow Papers, the ingest of 300 pamphlets for the Blockson Pamphlet collection, the Jewish Community Relations Council, the Nodnol Collection, and new items for the Medieval and Early Modern Manuscript collection for inclusion in BiblioPhilly, in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania. New content was scanned for ongoing projects, including the George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin Photographs and Clippings collections, Temple News, WPVI/KYW Log Books, Temple and Conwell history collections, YWCA collections for inclusion in the CLIR Project, In Her Own Right, and the Sci-fi corpus project in collaboration with the DSC.
  • In total, our team scanned 79,581 items this year, an increase of over 29,000 items from last year, and cataloged 4,401 items (from Scanning and Cataloging Statistics).

PA Digital

  • We onboarded 11 new contributors and harvested 478 new digital collections containing 61,534 new digital objects. PA Digital now has 394,774 total records discoverable through the DPLA.
  • We updated the PA Digital website.
  • We launched a formal Outreach and Curation team, which updated PA Digital’s Outreach Guidelines and Email Templates and Communication Policy. Worked with students from Temple’s College of Education to create and publish four primary source sets in August 2018 featuring PA Digital collections and highlighting significant topics in PA history: WWII and the Pennsylvania homefront, student protest, suffrage, and Quaker beliefs and practices. Two new students were hired in January 2019 to create four new primary source sets on new topics to be published later in the summer of 2019.
  • We hosted the following events:
    • Metadata Anonymous workshop (held at Penn State University in July 2018 attended by 16 people),
    • Copyright Open Office Hours (held March, April, and June 2018, and continuing this next fiscal year), and
    • “Frost, Cather, and Lovecraft: Coming to a Public Domain Near You” (a webinar on new items entering the public domain in December 2018).
  • We began developing a new aggregator environment based on Combine software, named Funnel Cake. The new aggregator will launch in Fall 2019 and will allow us to harvest and output richer metadata from our contributors.
  • Carla Davis Cunningham and Molly Larkin joined the internal PA Digital metadata review team.
  • PA Digital team members serve on DPLA working groups: Rachel Appel on Assessment (serves as Co-Chair), Leanne Finnigan on Metadata (serves as Co-Chair), Gabe Galson on Rights, Stefanie Ramsay on Outreach (serves as Chair), and Chad Nelson on Technology.

Cataloging

  • Cataloging production was similar to last year but slightly higher, growing from approximately 20,000 titles to approximately 21,500 titles across TUL. There was a reduction in shelf-ready cataloging by about 2,000 and a corresponding increase in in-house cataloging by about 3,500. Our original descriptions increased 40% from the previous year to 575 titles. Matt Ducmanas cataloged approximately 1200 titles for SCRC.
  • We fully integrated Health Sciences cataloging and receiving into Main campus operations this year, and we also began cataloging new books, games, and equipment for the DSC.
  • We completely cleared the backlog of federal and Pennsylvania state government documents. We hired a temporary cataloging librarian, Amy Mayer, who completed cataloging for 700 titles and 1500 volumes in the PA Docs collection. We also completed sorting through approximately 100 boxes of federal documents and approximately 1000 government CD-ROMs and sent these materials to Kardon as appropriate. Having cleared the government document backlog, we transitioned the receiving of any new tangible documents to the Collection Development and Acquisitions Department. Our department continues to catalog any newly received tangible documents and to load MARC records for all electronic titles in the Documents Without Shelves program.
  • Rachel Appel was trained in Alma copy cataloging and contributed to departmental cataloging work this year * Molly Larkin processed over 220,000 electronic resource records this year, including ebooks, streaming media, datasets, and government documents.

Metadata Enrichment Project

  • One of our major initiatives this year was to work with a vendor to provide metadata enrichments for our entire Alma database. Leanne Finnigan coordinated this project, working closely with Matt Ducmanas to liaise with SCRC and Blockson. Approximately 300,000 records were enriched with tables of contents and summaries, providing richer keyword access for discovery. Approximately 2,000,000 records were enriched with consistent forms of author names, subject headings, genre headings, and series headings, which will increase accuracy of faceting and searching in Library Search. All records were upgraded to current standards for catalog description and encoding; obsolete and incorrect coding was updated, and punctuation was normalized. All of this should vastly improve the accuracy of Library Search, which is crucial as we move to Charles Library and depend solely on Library Search for discovery for the majority of our collection.


Barcoding Project

  • We completed this major project, led by Carla Davis Cunningham, in May 2019. Over the past three years, we have retrospectively processed tens of thousands of items found in the Paley Stacks without a barcode, in preparation for the move to Charles Library. This year alone, we cataloged over 1700 titles for this project, created 5000 item records, and modified an additional 8000 item records. In addition to the items identified by Access Services, our staff used Alma to identify over 5500 additional items missing barcodes that had not previously been detected based on visual inspection, and also corrected hundreds of barcodes in Alma with missing digits or bad characters. All of these efforts contributed to the success of our ASRS implementation, resulting in thousands fewer items that would have otherwise failed to load into the ASRS when it came time to move, as well as making thousands of titles more discoverable in Library Search.


ASRS implementation & triage

  • Prior to the beginning of the move to Charles Library and the ingestion of materials into the ASRS, Holly Tomren worked with LTD and the Physical Collections Working Group to establish the connection between Alma and the Dematic ASRS inventory system. In April-May 2019, we ran Alma location change and remote storage inventory update jobs day and night, in order to populate the ASRS inventory system with the 1,250,000 items expected to move from Paley Library to the ASRS. Holly Tomren also participated in the test load of 1000 items into the ASRS in April and assisted with other ASRS request testing, working closely with the Library Search team to develop catalog public display options that would minimize confusion and maximize alternate access to resources both during the ASRS location change process as well as in the period following the closure of Paley Library.
  • Following the beginning of ASRS ingestion in mid-May, our department began handling items that were rejected from the ASRS because they were not in Alma or for other reasons. MADS staff were trained to use the Dematic software to check the ASRS inventory in order to assist with troubleshooting. This began a new retrospective cataloging project, following the closure of our previous project to catalog items missing barcodes. As of June 30, over 7000 volumes had been returned to our department for troubleshooting because they were not in Alma. We also worked with Acquisitions to troubleshoot 1600 items with Main Stacks locations that should have been green-dotted. Between our department and others, we were able to return 24,000 corrected items back to the ASRS from May 21 to June 30, 2019.
  • From May 21 through June 30, 2019, we cataloged over 1300 retrospective titles that had come back to our department via the ASRS triage process. We managed this all while maintaining regular new book cataloging operations at the end of the fiscal year, which is one of the busiest times for new book acquisitions. In addition, during this same period, Matt Ducmanas and Holly Tomren corrected Alma records for over 21,000 items that had been successfully loaded into the ASRS, but had been previously marked as missing or some other unavailable status in Alma, or had other incorrect material types or item policies.


Other Move-related preparation

  • In addition to the two major retrospective cataloging projects mentioned above, we also participated in a great deal of other collection related projects to prepare for the move to Charles Library.
  • In order to reduce the number of volumes that needed to be moved from Paley to Charles Library, the Acquisitions and Collection Development department identified a number of bound journals and duplicate monographs that could be deselected. Molly Larkin processed 75,000 withdrawn bound journal volumes, comprising over 1100 titles that needed to be removed from our catalog and our holdings removed from WorldCat, while Myra Hom and others processed 1500 duplicate monograph withdrawals.
  • When it was determined that some Paley microfilm reels would be housed in the ASRS, Molly Larkin created approximately 1000 detailed item records for each reel belonging to the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, so that they could be barcoded and added to the ASRS.
  • Leading up to the move, numerous collections changed locations. Leanne Finnigan facilitated the Alma location changes for over 5,000 items in Media and Oversize collections that were moved to Kardon. A new Juvenile collection was created, for which Leanne Finnigan changed the Alma locations for 3600 items and Evelyn Lane helped with relabeling. As part of the ASRS-related location changes, we also transferred the majority of the Paley Reference collection to circulating stacks.
  • To complement our retrospective cataloging efforts, we outsourced the cataloging of over 500 materials for which we do not have in-house language expertise, in order to expedite the processing of these materials prior to the move to Charles Library and to ensure timely patron access.
  • Numerous MADS staff contributed to measuring & green dot stickering projects in order to prepare the physical collection to be moved from Paley to Charles Library.
  • We developed an inventory of digitization equipment to track the move from Paley to Charles and coordinated the move of the Quartz planetary scanner with a vendor.

Database cleanup

  • In addition to the above mentioned database maintenance related to the move, we also performed ongoing cleanup to the various metadata repositories we maintain, including CONTENTdm and Alma.
  • To prepare for the migration of electronic theses and dissertations from CONTENTdm to DSpace, we updated identifiers and/or filenames for over 1,300 records.
  • In Alma, we cleared out numerous defunct location codes, removed approximately 2000 records for returned leisure books, identified and updated items with a Music Restricted item policy, fixed approximately 3000 broken URLs in bibliographic records, and continued to cleanup electronic resource portfolios following Alma migration.
  • Altogether we modified approximately 50,000 physical item records in Alma between various projects, including retrospective cataloging, and we withdraw nearly 100,000 items, including bound journals and duplicates.

Hathi Trust Phase 2

  • This year, Temple University joined the phase 2 Hathi Trust partnership, in which we committed to retain approximately 25,000 physical items for a period of 25 years. As a result of our participation, we needed to add retention notes to these records in Alma at three levels (bibliographic, holdings, and item) and develop a workflow to prevent these items from being deselected in the future. Leanne Finnigan was responsible for updating 25,405 items and 25,049 titles & holdings as well as identifying a special item note field to support our ongoing retention workflow. Institutional Repository Implementation
  • MADS staff including Rachel Appel, resident librarian Jasmine Clark, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, Stefanie Ramsay, and Holly Tomren served in the Institutional Repository Services Metadata Subgroup in order to develop the metadata infrastructure to support Temple’s new DSpace repository. This subgroup developed a metadata application profile, controlled vocabularies, and metadata crosswalks, all of which are key to the technical implementation of the repository as well as ongoing IR services and resource discovery.
  • Rachel Appel also served on the Institutional Repository Services group to write preservation, recommended file formats, metadata, and withdrawal policies.

Ongoing Library Search & Website metadata advising

  • MADS staff continued to provide metadata consultation and support to ongoing Library Search and Website development efforts. This year, we worked with developers on features including Purchase on Demand Ebooks, Bound-With titles, Music/Uniform Titles, and display of URLs. We also began meeting with developers to explore an infrastructure for incorporating authority records into Library Search and other metadata environments in the future.


Symplectic Elements

  • Rachel Appel and Michael Carroll trained and oversaw 5 student workers and coordinated with 6 liaison librarians to populate publications for the College of Science and Technology, Boyer College of Music and Dance, and School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts in Temple University’s research information management system. Rachel also provided trainings for university staff in the College of Engineering and Information and Technology Services. Elements connects to library databases such as Web of Science and PubMed and automatically ingests publications authored by faculty members; Rachel worked with the library’s Research Information Management (RIM) Team to configure Elements settings to ensure accurate matching and ingestion of these faculty authored publications.

Cataloging in Publication Partnership with Library of Congress

  • This year we formally began our partnership with the Library of Congress to prepare Cataloging in Publication metadata for Temple University Press titles. As a cataloging partner with Temple University Press, we will be able to work with them to create optimal bibliographic records with a quick turnaround time. Our participation in the Cataloging in Publication Program was delayed for most of the year by the development of a new platform at the Library of Congress for the distribution of publishers’ galleys and submission of MARC records; we were not able to start until the platform was implemented. Carla Davis Cunningham served as the liaison to the Library of Congress throughout the year and attended training for the new platform in May 2019. We are now eagerly awaiting our first galley from Temple University Press.

Name Authority Cooperative Program of the Library of Congress (NACO)

  • We continued our participation in the NACO program and added two new NACO-trained staff, Carla Davis Cunningham and Molly Larkin. We contributed 60 names to the Library of Congress Name Authority File this year.

Project Passage

  • Rachel Appel, Jasmine Clark, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, and Holly Tomren participated in a project to test OCLC’s linked data prototype, named Project Passage. During Summer 2018, we created descriptions for digital images, archival collections, and events, using OCLC’s Wikibase system, and contributed feedback and suggestions about our experiences. Temple’s work on digital images was highlighted by OCLC during the project’s office hours and became a component of a forthcoming OCLC Research report on the project.

Member Merge

  • Carla Davis Cunningham, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, Molly Larkin, and Holly Tomren received training and worked with an OCLC liaison to learn how to merge duplicate records in the WorldCat database. While we had to take a break from this project to focus on more immediate needs at Temple, we look forward to returning to this project in order to help contribute to metadata quality beyond Temple.

Technology Projects & Initiatives

  • Rachel Appel, Jasmine Clark, Stefanie Ramsay, and Holly Tomren participated in the new Technology Projects & Initiatives Roundtable, serving to document and improve project management practices at TUL.

MADS staff participated in several Library Strategic Steering Teams:

  •  Collections Strategy: Holly Tomren (also subgroup: Physical Collections Working Group)
  •  Research Data Services: Leanne Finnigan (partial year)
  •  Scholarly Communications: Rachel Appel

FY 17-18

Our department saw significant organizational change this year. In December 2017, Holly Tomren became the new head of the Cataloging and Metadata Services (CAMS) department, a position that had been vacant since the retirement of Mark Darby in May 2017. In January 2018 we welcomed Stefanie Ramsay as new Digital Projects Librarian. In February 2018, Delphine Khanna departed as head of the Digital Library Initiatives (DLI) department. Finally, in April 2018, the former CAMS and DLI departments merged to become Metadata and Digitization Services (MADS). Staff have adapted well to our new department, and we look forward to increased opportunities for collaboration and alignment of metadata-related activities in TULUP.

During and following Alma migration, Carla Davis Cunningham, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, Myra Hom, Evelyn Lane, Molly Larkin, Yelena Lidskaya, and Celio Pichardo have been actively involved in learning the new system and optimizing our workflows, working closely with our colleagues in other departments to make TUL resources available and discoverable. We had to redesign key operational workflows, including day-to-day cataloging, batch cataloging from our shelf-ready vendor, outsourced cataloging for music scores and foreign language materials, e-resource batch loading and maintenance, authority control maintenance, WorldCat holdings, data exports for resource sharing and HathiTrust, resource withdrawal, database maintenance, and statistics gathering. Staff had to learn new skills, including the Drools query syntax, as well as different data models needed to use and understand the new system.

As members of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging Name Authority Cooperative Program (NACO), we increased our efforts to create descriptions and identifiers for people and organizations that are then added to the Library of Congress Name Authority File and the Virtual International Authority File. This year, Matt Ducmanas contributed over 100 authority records to the national database, establishing unique identities for many people and organizations significant to Philadelphia’s past and present, as represented in TUL’s collections. We are working on strategies to further increase our contributions to the Name Authority File in the future by training additional staff.

Despite the challenges in adjusting to Alma, cataloging production remained high, with approximately 20,000 titles cataloged, including approximately 400 original descriptions and nearly 2,000 retrospective descriptions of items found in the Paley Stacks without a barcode. The cataloging production totals represent a decrease of approximately 5,000 titles (20%) from two years ago, however this reflects TUL’s changing acquisitions patterns, which includes more online/streaming and DDA access models, as well as changes in how e-resources are handled in Alma, which in some cases require less intervention from our department. Cataloging turn-around time is swift (generally about one week from receipt to shelf) and the department has no cataloging backlog of new resources.

We worked closely with the Library Technology Development team on developing the Blacklight search interface, including refining metadata mappings and identifying opportunities for metadata cleanup and enrichment to improve discovery.

In addition to our ongoing workflows, we have also been working on several metadata cleanup projects, including re-organizing our e-resource portfolios following Alma migration, as well as cleanup of locations, material types, and other metadata elements that affect faceted discovery.

Resident Librarian Jasmine Clark started a rotation in our department in May 2018. From May-June 2018, she contributed to the PA Digital project, helped develop metadata profiles in Symplectic Elements, and worked with Matt Ducmanas on special collections cataloging.

We wrapped up our third year of the LSTA funded PA Digital project and started year four. Temple University acts as the home of the DPLA Service Hub for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and many MADS staff members contribute to the project, conducting metadata review with partner institutions, performing outreach statewide, and providing technology support for our aggregator software.

This year, we onboarded 35 new institutions whose collections comprised over 115,000 new digital objects (records) in the DPLA as well as additional collections from existing contributors. As of June 2018, our totals include 333,240 objects, 73 contributing institutions, and 448 collections since PA Digital went live in April 2016. This is a 54.3% increase in records from the prior fiscal year.

Stefanie Ramsay and Michael Carroll designed a new PA Digital website, including an infographic designed by Gabe Galson that helps contributors navigate standardized rights statements.

Temple’s PA Digital team gave 6 community webinars and workshops throughout the year and worked with educators to design four curated primary source sets from PA Digital resources, which will be available as K-12 instructional materials on the PA Digital website.

We successfully applied to be a sole source provider of the PA Digital service for our 5th LSTA grant via the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, with a grant award of $150,000, approximately double the amount of previous years.

Two large collections of content were digitized and made available: Frank G. Zahn Railroad Photograph Collection and the Jacob H. Gomborow Papers. Progress also continued on long-term digitization projects such as the George D. McDowell Philadelphia Evening Bulletin collection.

MADS staff, including our student employees, digitized over 49,000 objects, completed over 400 special digitization orders, and cataloged over 8,000 digital objects. There are now over 125,000 cataloged objects that are discoverable in CONTENTdm.

We continued to capture information about Temple University’s scholarly output in Symplectic Elements. Rachel Appel, Michael Carroll, and student workers (Alicia Pucci, John Smith, Sam Miller, Evron Hadley, and Edward Leinheiser) partnered with subject librarians and faculty to create over 700 faculty profiles this year from College of Public Health, College of Education, and College of Science and Technology, and started work with the School of Theater, Film, and Media Arts and Boyer College of Music and Dance.

In collaboration and coordination with SCRC staff, Phil D’Andrea and Michael Carroll captured 9,142,018 documents totaling 240.8GB of data through the Archive-It web archiving service. The captured seeds contain web materials that supplement the existing physical and digital Urban Archives, Philadelphia Dance Collection, and the Jewish Archives collections.

Rachel Appel and Delphine Khanna wrapped up work on the Knight-funded Future Proofing Civic Data research project, investigating the challenges of long-term preservation for open civic datasets. The project team interviewed over a dozen stakeholders about their use cases and needs and looked at several open civic data initiatives in Philadelphia, Boston, San Francisco, and the Pittsburgh area, to compare practices and examine real-life examples. The project team produced a white paper summarizing its findings, available at bitly.com/futureproofingcivicdata Rachel Appel, Jasmine Clark, Matt Ducmanas, Leanne Finnigan, and Holly Tomren participated in a partnership with OCLC to test Project Passage, a linked data prototype for bibliographic metadata, based on a Wikidata platform. We began the process of moving some documentation and task management to Confluence and JIRA.

MADS staff participated in several Library Strategic Steering Teams:

Collections Strategy: Holly Tomren (also subgroup: Physical Collections Working Group)

Research Data Services: Leanne Finnigan

Scholarly Communications: Rachel Appel