Several new and/or expanded initiatives highlight 2005 news from the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT), an LC Bibliographic Access Directorate initiative aimed at developing tools to aid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchers in creating and locating information. Among these developments are the significant expansion of BEAT's various Reviews projects and the introduction of the Machine Generated 505 project that adds table of contents data to the catalog record. In addition, three web-based TOC projects continue to expand (with 6 million hits on the LC pages for TOC now recorded), the Web Cataloging Assistant program (providing machine assisted cataloging of electronic text resources from the Web) has grown, and in turn continues to facilitate increased access to current literature found in web resources through BEAT's Web Access to Publications in Series project, and with support from LC partners, new resources have been linked from LC catalog records for items in the collections to full electronic texts for those monographs in the Web Access to Works in the Public Domain project.
In addition to the items included in this report, information on other major components of the BEAT's work: enriching the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records, improving access to the data the records contain, and conducting research and development in areas that can contribute to furthering these efforts may be found starting at the main BEAT web page at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat
An outgrowth of BEAT's Web Access to Publications in Series project (see below), Web Cataloging Assistant has now been in operation for exactly one year. It is currently being used to catalog monographs from 32 different series. From the 112 items cataloged in its first production month (June 2004), it has now accounted for (as of May 31, 2005) more than 2800 electronic monographs cataloged. This project evolved from the experiences that the Business and Economics Cataloging Team gained in providing access at the individual monograph level for selected series. However, by using programming developed by team member David Williamson, it has now been proved possible to significantly automate much of that process and as a result the operation now allows a cataloger to examine the abstract page for a particular monograph on the Web, and by using computer and programmed functions effect the creation of a MARC record that is automatically added to the LC database. This record includes an abstract of the title represented. A cataloger subsequently enhances that cataloging data to ensure that name headings are established and adds subject headings. The capability greatly reduces manual aspects of the project and allows catalogers to concentrate on the intellectual work, thus providing an enriched record through largely automated means.
This project has several facets, the first of which is to link many "working paper/discussion paper" type serial publications to their Web-based electronic versions. These links provide access to electronic versions of these publications. With this project LC provides more timely, comprehensive, and cost effective access to these series. In a second area of activity the Library's Serial Record Division is creating electronic serial records for a number of high research value monographic series that have not been represented in LC's catalogs, thereby opening up a rich, new source of information for researchers who may now access electronic versions of those items. So far, these efforts have provided access to the full electronic texts of more than 30,000 individual monographs. As a further enhancement, a pilot project has been launched to create electronic resource records for the individual monographs of selected series. In all, Web Access to Publications in Series currently has links to more than 300 series. A noteworthy enhancement to both the project and for Business Reference services has been the creation of a web-accessible database of Technical Reports and Working Papers in Business and Economics for series covered by the project. The database can be accessed at http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/techreps/techrepshome.php
This BEAT project is adding full text table of contents (TOC) data to catalog records - - information that was previously available only through links from within catalog records to LC's web-based TOCs for those items. In addition to English language materials, the project has recently expanded to include items in German.
The original TOC data was generated from information captured from the scanned table of contents images from books and is now being added to field 505 by computer programs. Fields with such information are preceded by the legend: "Machine generated contents note:". Because the scanned table of contents reflect a wide variety of formats and structures, some errors are to be expected in the placement and configuration of the 505 texts, and the 505 data is not reviewed for punctuation.
Over the past few years BEAT has created web-based TOC from its digital TOC (dTOC) project for almost 30,000 books, and the MG 505 has begun by adding the texts from those files to the catalog records for those titles. The project is ongoing and will add TOC for both new titles (some source data is also from digital items) and over time data from other BEAT TOC projects as well. One section of the project is being devoted to digitizing and adding data from the Library's Local History and Genealogical collections. To date almost 10,000 TOC have been added to LC catalog records. A few sample LCCNs include 00010582, 00013089, 00048663, and 00108641
This project makes links from the LC Catalog to full electronic texts of items for which LC has an exact match in print represented in the LC collections. This project is able to do so with the cooperation of other partner institutions such as research libraries and other organizations who are digitizing electronic versions of works freely available and for which LC LC provides links to the electronic versions from its catalog records for the print versions.
Two new partners and their recent additions are especially noteworthy. These are the RAND Corporation and the Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland. In the case of the former, over 680 links have been made to RAND publications via the RAND Web site <http://www.rand.org/publications>. (An example may be found in the LC catalog for LCCN 2002024809 (or by searching the Library's OPAC for the title "Protecting the homeland" by Richard Brennan) that links to the full text of the document at http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1490/.
In the second new partnership, over 140 links have been made to publications of the United States Commission on Civil Rights digitized by the Thurgood Marshall Law Library, University of Maryland at <http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/index.asp>. An example may be found in the LC catalog by searching LCCN 283602759 (or by searching the title "Accommodating the spectrum of individual abilities”) which links to : http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/usccr/documents/cr11081.pdf.
BEAT continues to expand provision of access or links for works in the Library’s collections to stable, scholarly, and attributable sources for book reviews and several recent initiatives have resulted in new collaborative agreements for such material.
One new partnership is with the College of Education at Arizona State University and the Michigan State Libraries for the online publication Education Review (ER) which “publishes reviews of recent books in education, covering the entire range of scholarship and practice.” The project has linked to over 350 catalog records to corresponding ER reviews <http://edrev.asu.edu> and some are published in Spanish or Portuguese. Many reviews also contain bibliographical references. As examples, readers may search LCCN 2003012878 (or use the OPAC keyword search for Thelin + “Education Higher” which, when retrieved and selected will display a hot-link to the review for A History of American Higher Education as well as links to other data. Or, for a Spanish example, search the title “La Universidad de Papel” in the LC OPAC.
A second new source for reviews is the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) which has granted LC permission to use and archive book reviews contained in retrospective issues of its flagship scholarly publication, Library Resources & Technical Services (LRTS). Ultimately these reviews will cover issues as far back as 1999.
Ongoing reviews projects also include links to H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the online journal of H-NET : Humanities and Social Sciences Online; to sections of annual compilations on reference books that appear in American Libraries with permission granted by the Reference and User Services Association division of the American Library Association); to reviews for monographs from a separately maintained database at LC for the Handbook of Latin American Studies (HLAS) and to the MARS Best Free Reference Web Sites selected by the Machine-Assisted Reference Section (MARS) of ALA's Reference and User Services Association. Information on all of these projects can be found on the BEAT web page.
Tables of Contents data for E-CIP has two components.
The Digital Tables of Contents project creates machine-readable Table of Contents (TOC) data from TOC surrogates and these materials are subsequently HTML-encoded and placed on a server at the Library. The process cross-links the TOC to underlying catalog records. Both the catalog records and the linked TOC data may be viewed through a Web browser by accessing the Library's online catalog access options. Almost 30,000 TOCs have been created and linked in this project.
In addition, more than 6 million hits have been recorded on the TOC files section of BEAT Web pages for the three web-based TOC projects combined.
This project will result in significantly improved access to approximately 6,500 pre-1970 Congressional hearings, improving service to the Congress and addressing an important objective in the Bibliographic Access Directorate’s strategic plan. Other benefits to be derived include central, as opposed to dispersed availability of the hearings, better access to the content of the items, improved cataloging describing these hearings, and the addition of other information concerning alternate data source availability.
The project is being undertaken through the collaborative efforts of several Library units including the Congressional Research Service and Law Library, with the added benefit derived from such cooperation. The methodology employed consists of identifying and retrieving the items that make up the body of these hearings, reclassifying to class KF in the Law schedules and upgrading the cataloging for the items, exploring making digital copies available for hearings in poor physical condition, re-labeling the items to reflect the new classification, and housing them in a single location, the Law Library.
ONIX (ONline Information eXchange) is a means of representing book industry product information and is being used by some publishers today to communicate that data electronically.
BECITES+ (Bibliographies plus: Enhanced Citations with Indexes, Tables of contents, Electronic resources and Sources cited) enhances staff- produced bibliographies, and the catalog records for the titles included in such bibliographies, by adding links to their tables of contents, indexes, and sources cited. Another recent initiative has been the scanning and conversion to text of heavily used, but out-of- print guides to Library collections whose individual items are not easily identified in the Library's online catalog.
In addition to guides previously completed in business, immigration, and the works of Jefferson, the project has digitized ten titles published by the Center for the Book as well as a Guide to Manuscripts in the Monasteries of Mt. Athos. A number of other works are in progress, covering additional business resources, guides to microfilm collections, prints and photographs resources, manuscripts from additional Middle Eastern monasteries, as well as a guide to Ladino publications in the Library of Congress. The BeCites+ main Web page is located at http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/guide
The Library is in discussion with the INFOMINE Project (http://infomine.ucr.edu) at the University of California, Riverside about establishing a cooperative agreement to test the iVia software (http://infomine.ucr.edu/iVia/) developed for the INFOMINE project. iVia harvests, analyzes, and processes metadata from Web sites and other digital objects for use in the INFOMINE database. The parties believe that it would benefit the library community worldwide to incorporate the Library’s subject authority and classification data into the iVia automatic classifier capability. It is thought that the incorporation of this data will improve the ability of the iVia software to generate metadata useful to the Library and other libraries, with minimal intervention by cataloging staff. The goal of the cooperative agreement would be to test this hypothesis.
Questions regarding BEAT and its activities may be directed to John D. Byrum Jr., Chief, Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division Library of Congress jbyr@loc.gov
This page last updated June 16, 2005
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