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.…

Scholarly web-based application programming interfaces (APIs) allow users to interact with information and data programmatically. Interacting with information programmatically allows users to create advanced information query workflows and quickly access machine-readable data for downstream computations. With the growing availability of scholarly…

To facilitate the chemistry education community in locating and evaluating published assessment instruments, the Chemistry Instrument Review and Assessment Library (CHIRAL) encompasses a number of resources. First and foremost, CHIRAL contains a catalog of over 500 assessment instruments that is easily searchable, allowing for the identification…

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…

Technology makes it possible to redefine libraries and make them relevant to the public once again. But how good are the digital services offered by public libraries today? The digital services department team of the Pode project at Norway's Oslo Public Library has spent the last 2 years investigating the possibilities available in order to…

Resource Description and Access (RDA) represents both a revised set of cataloging rules and a completely new framework in which to catalog. It aims for backward compatibility with AACR2 at the same time that it seeks to facilitate moving library data to the Semantic Web. Given these competing goals, it's not surprising that RDA's implementation…

This article proposes a metadata dictionary (MDD) be used as a tool for metadata management. The MDD is a repository of critical data necessary for managing metadata to create "shareable" digital collections. An operational definition of metadata management is provided. The authors explore activities involved in metadata management in…

The technology of the 21st century has had no shortage of challenges for libraries, but it has also brought opportunities. Operating systems, databases, and application environments that can use cheap off-the-shelf hardware to scale and handle hundreds of millions of transactions were not developed for libraries. However, libraries have taken…

Purpose: This paper aims to elaborate the library data migration process from LAMP (Library Automation Management Program) to the open source software Koha's (2.2.8 Windows based) Pakistani flavour PakLAG-Koha in six legislative assembly libraries of Pakistan. Design/methodology/approach: The paper explains different steps of the data migration…

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…

This article explores ontological principles and their potential applications in the formal description of archival photographs. Current archival descriptive practices are reviewed and the larger question is addressed: do archivists who are engaged in describing photographs need a more formalized system of representation, or do existing encoding…

This article provides an overview of and rationale for the use of authority in school libraries--from both an historical and current/future perspective. First, the importance of consistent, meaningful authority term context and form is discussed. Then, the exciting, yet challenging, role of authority in today's information world is…

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…

The Knowledge Bank is The Ohio State University's institutional repository, which houses various works by students, faculty, and staff. One of the text collections in the Knowledge Bank is electronic honors theses. Training students to submit their theses was initially given in the form of in-person workshops. Turnout for these workshops was…

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…