Even as librarians have spent the past twenty years documenting the rich world of scholarly communication beyond the catalog, repositories and catalogs too often remain completely siloed from each other. Current practices and tools to unite the two focus entirely on matching names, an imprecise method requiring substantial time spent on review.…

Historical and modern scientific thought is dominated by the English language, colonized science, patriarchal norms, and Westernized "ways of knowing." By making materials that lie outside that narrative discoverable (e.g., non-Western science, Indigenous/Aboriginal knowledge, women in science, etc.) we can assert that science is a…

This paper examines the University of Sydney Library's development and piloting of a methodology to survey its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural collections, to enhance catalogue metadata and allow culturally sensitive material to be identified and protected. The research falls broadly within the interpretivist epistemology and draws…

Map librarianship, in the past incorporating duties involving acquisition, cataloging, or curation of physical map and atlas collections, has evolved into a profession often requiring knowledge of geographic information systems (GIS) software and data. This study examines descriptions for map and geospatial academic library positions from 2015 to…

This report provides university and research library leaders with useful insights on emerging practices and infrastructures in European research information management (RIM), on the current and future role of persistent person and organization identifiers, and, more specifically, on incentives and barriers to adoption in three different national…

The open access (OA) movement is working to transform scholarly communication around the world, but this philosophy can also apply to metadata and cataloging records. While some notable, large academic libraries, such as Harvard University, the University of Michigan, and the University of Cambridge, released their cataloging records under OA…

Revealing hidden assets stewarded by research institutions so they can be made available for research and learning locally and globally is a prime opportunity for libraries to create and deliver new value. "Making Archival and Special Collections More Accessible" collects important work OCLC Research has done to help achieve the…

Librarians are familiar with the single-line form, the consolidated index, which represents a very large portion of a library's print and online collection. Their end users are familiar with the idea of a single search across a comprehensive index that produces a large, relevancy-ranked results list. Even though most patrons would not recognize…

It has become widely recognised across the academic and research libraries sector that special collections and archives play a key role in differentiating each institution from its peers. In recognition of this, Research Libraries UK (RLUK) established the workstrand "Unique and Distinctive Collections" (UDC) in support of its strategic…

The rumored death of librarianship caused by the advent of technology has not, and will not, come to pass. In this article, the author describes how technology has exponentially increased the librarian's ability to provide library service at the Calcasieu Parish Public Library, where she serves as head of Collection & Computing Services. The…

One of the most exciting developments to occur within the library profession in recent years has been the re-evaluation of library's role in resource discovery in the web environment. This has involved recognition of short-comings of online library catalogues, a re-affirmation of the importance of metadata and a new focus on the wealth of…

This discussion report identifies key issues in the management of special collections material in the 21st century. The report uses a broad definition of "special collections," which encompasses distinctive material in all media and attendant library services. The group's main focus was on 19th- and 20th-century materials, including…

A questionnaire survey conducted at the State Library of Victoria indicates that users in general, and not just scholars, value the standard elements of bibliographic data found in the Library's catalogues, and consider all these elements useful for finding, identifying and selecting items. Rather than making do with less, users wanted more…

Libraries must increasingly accommodate bibliographic records encoded with a variety of standards and emerging standards, including Dublin Core, MODS, and VRA Core. The problem is that many libraries still rely solely on MARC and AACR2. The best-trained professionals to lead librarians through the metadata maze are catalogers. Catalogers…

We should be grateful that Terry Reese had to work his way through college. As a work-study student, taught to do cartographic cataloging in the University, of Oregon's map library, he discovered the mental challenges libraries offered. Later he became Oregon State University (OSU)'s cataloger for networked resources and digital unit production…