CALA 21st Century Librarian Seminar Series, Shanxi University II

I was so surprised to see many young librarians and library directors in the seminar. It is normal to see many senior librarians in the United States, but, definitely, not in China. Once you were in that atmosphere, you would be deeply moved by those young professionals' curiosities.

Young Chinese librarians are specially interested in emerging technologies, new library services and electronic collection development. Only state university libraries have developed institutional repositories, and also run into the challenge of recruiting high quality contents. Some science librarians offer patent search to their senior undergraduate and graduate students, but not intensively and systematically teach patent search skills. It was unexpected to get a few good questions on patent search, e.g. how to use patent classification to search and how scientific information literacy is taught in the USA.

Currently, there four billions mobile subscribers in the world and two-thirds of them live in the developing countries. China is a huge market for mobile service. Mobile computing is a hot topic, although the service hasn't been offered to students in China yet. My American colleague gave a great overview on the application of mobile computing in American academic libraries. Young Chinese librarians were so excited about the current practices in the USA, such as, provide library services through mobile devices; access e-resources via iphone, smartphone and ipad.

Who Should Create Metadata for Online Submissions in DSpace II?

What happens at small academic/research libraries? At some libraries, metadata librarians or archivists create metadata for a variety of collections if metadata standards have been established. However, this is not only a huge amount of work, but also needs professionals to do the job. Today, to facilitate metadata creation, metadata librarians are seeking for batch loading or auto-generated metadata to provide access to digital contents with the benefit of technologies. This is an emerging challenge for Metadata or Digital Initiative Librarians. When libraries migrate a collection to a new platform, batch loading metadata for the collection is more efficient and effective, especially if the collection is not created from the scratch. This also needs metadata librarians to map metadata in one system to those in another with their expertise.

Some people think the library can use students or paraprofessionals to do the job. I would say Yes and No. As you might notice, the purpose of metadata creation is to let users easily find the information they need. If a person doesn't understand the philosophy of the information retrieval, how can he/she know to create the right access for users? However, if metadata librarians can set up some procedures, teach them some of the processes, then they would be a great help to metadata librarians. For instance, if metadata librarians set up batch loading form, students or paraprofessionals will prepare the basic metadata form first, then metadata librarians can work on the form and batch load metadata into DSpace.

Therefore, there is no rules for this. Librarians should allocate tasks with the collaboration of the personnel in the libraries. The bottom line is to facilitate metadata creation for digital collections.

Who Should Create Metadata for Online Submissions in DSpace I?

Since the Miller Library started to deposit seniors theses in the college digital repository DSpace in 2007, librarians have been wondering who is the appropriate person to create metadata for theses. Ideally, metadata librarians can do this with best knowledge they have. However, most submitted theses need original cataloging. Usually, there is only one metadata /cataloging librarian in a small academic or research library to do this type of original work. The amount of electronic theses received by the library each year is far beyond what a metadata librarian can handle in a timely manner. Especially, the metadata librarian has to design metadata models for different types of electronic collections, and facilitate access for users to easily search information in Dspace. So what are the possible solutions?

At large university libraries, students submit theses and dissertations online. In this submission process, a senior needs to create descriptive metadata for his own work, such as title, author, keywords, abstract, table of contents etc. After the student submits his/her thesis, the metadata librarian will review the submission. If the thesis passes the review, the librarian will publish it right away. If the metadata librarian finds out inappropriate metadata in the submission, s/he will not publish it until errors are fixed.

Building an Institutional Repository for Your Instutution

Institutional repositories (IRs) have been successfully populated at higher education institutions, where users not only get open access to those scholarly publications, but also create collections. It opens the door to share research information within or beyond the community. IRs are also extremely useful at research companies.

Research companies could set up different communities to share information at different levels. This will reduce duplicate paperwork, such as lab reports, lab records and datasheet. It also minimize the requests for the same information, and leads to a green business environment. The easily customized workflow could be designed to facilate researchers to deposit thier data in a moment. IRs could also serve as a platform for record management. The descriptive metadata and administrative metadata can be shared or transferred as a part of management records.

Currently, some open source software, such as DSpace, Greenstone, Fedora, are widely used at academic libraries. The other commercial products, such as CONTENTdm and Inmagic Presto, are also used in business environment. How to create an institutional repository and promote it in your community? The article, Building an Instutional Repository at a Liberal Arts College, might give you some thoughts and inspiration.