Cataloging when you are not a cateloger

No doubt providing metadata to content is a challenging process. There is what you would consider to be common sense, for example a journal article about feline leukemia would obviously be placed in the subject areas of cats but what about more granular areas and to what degree do you include metadata? Do you also put the article in veterinary medicine, pets, and/or cancer research? Fortunately we have metadata specialists, or catalogers, who are experts in taxonomies to handle this but I am not one of them and I have to go off what I assume to be the correct fields.


In the case of my trial Eprints repository I chose to use content I created for the Library Channel and in doing so I had to work with both the categories and tags we use to organize our materials for navigation on the website. Immediately I threw out our categories because they are specific to campus and function, which does not translate to a generalized repository. I did however use our tags (which technically are designed as a web 2.0 form of classification for user creator classifications) because those better represent the subjects each programs deals with and were provided by myself and a real life librarian who oversees our productions. Those items were then plugged into the default keywords field since that particular area is not a controlled vocabulary and allowed for greater flexibility.


Secondly, I took the main concepts of the videos I was ingesting, that they are produced at a university, by a library and deal with specific topics and then picked from the selection of Library of Congress (LOC)subject headings to actually indicate the items subjects. I believe that some future seeker of information looking for content about library instruction or the topics they dealt would use this information to find the materials. The more looser, granular topics are in keywords and can be searched there as well.


I can’t say I was overly concerned about consistency other than maintaining similar subject fields and using the keywords that were originally used to facet the materials from their original publication interfaces. With such a limited collection this was not a problem, however if the collection were to grow I would have to be more concerned that each item was receiving the same level of care and consideration as it is being ingested. I would also go back look at trends. I did for example take a look at the items by subjects and noticed out of six objects that one was had a lower number in the “Library Sciences” subject heading and was able to correct it accordingly.