Library of CongressBibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team
Interim Report, for ALA 1997
The Library Services Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) is pursuing several initiatives of potential interest to the community. The focus of BEAT's work is in the area of business and economics, although many projects are intended to serve as pilots with potential application to library materials in other fields.
BEOnline is a pilot project that is developing approaches to identifying, selecting and providing bibliographic access to electronic works --particularly, those of interest to the practice or study of entrepreneurship and small business -- that are remotely available via the Internet. The team responsible for this project has concluded the planning phase and has achieved the following objectives:
The project team has also created a Web site (http://lcweb.loc.gov/rr/business/beonline/beohome.html) which not only spells out the details regarding selection criteria, cataloging framework and cataloging workflow cited above, but also identifies the first 75 electronic resources selected for cataloging together with hot-links to enable access to them from the Web site.
Over the summer the project team will process the selected titles in a collaborative effort in which the public service participant will initiate the catalog record while describing the resource for selection purposes; this involves use of a program that converts descriptive data to MARC fields. The catalogers will then complete the record by adding access points, appropriate notes and other technical details. These records will be distributed and also posted to the BEOnline home page. As the pilot progresses, data will be gathered to establish the cost- effectiveness of this approach to providing bibliographic access to remote Internet resources judged to be of high-research value.
Another project sponsored by BEAT is systematic revision of subclasses H through HG of the Library of Congress Classification (LCC). The candidate classes include statistics, economic theory and history, management, labor and personnel management, finance, and the other core business subjects. In this activity, guidelines are being applied to achieve improvements as follows: (1) form and chronological sub-arrangements are being standardized (2) geographic lists are being expanded and updated; (3) topical captions are being revised to reflect LCSH terminology with notes added to clarify usage; (4) unnecessarily complex sub-arrangements are being simplified while overlapping or difficult to distinguish topics are being consolidated; and (5) legal topics within this class are being referred to class K (Law).
To date, a draft revision of H through most of HD has been prepared; the editors anticipate completion of the entire project by the end of 1997.
Work on another BEAT effort in the area of LCC, development of the new schedules JZ and KZ, international relations and law, is now nearing conclusion. Important components of the new JZ schedule are those sections of the former JX dealing with international organizations and international aspects of business.
As of May 30, the project leader had completed training and input sessions with appropriate catalogers. A final review of the text itself is underway; thereafter the Cataloging Distribution Service (CDS) will prepare a preliminary edition that will be available for purchase. Meanwhile, the current draft has been provided to libraries that need it for reclassification. These users are sharing suggestions, many of which will be adopted for the preliminary edition. Within LC, experiments to reclassify according to the new schedules.
BEAT has initiated a digital Table of Contents (TOC) project, one designed to establish whether the Library could develop an efficient process to link TOC data with underlying MARC records using access through the World Wide Web to present the information to catalog and other users. The process involves scanning and optical character recognition and utilizes programs written in the Cataloging Directorate to automate much of the work.
This project is intended to supplement the ever increasing availability of TOC resulting from expansion of the electronic CIP (E-CIP) program where TOC data are included in the MARC records for about 50% of the titles processed as E-CIPs. It is also separate from other investigations underway to explore the possibility of acquiring TOC data for certain publications from a vendor.
The original goal of the digital TOC project, as a pilot, was to create data for approximately 100 titles, and this has now been done. A small bench-mark test of the process has been completed and the project staff is currently evaluating the results, with special interest in determining cost of staff time to perform the process. However, the programming required for the automated portions of the experiment -- such as that which automatically encodes the text with HTML and creates MARC record links is not yet complete, though some portions are already in place. All the TOC processed through this pilot and any processed hereafter will be available through the Library's Web interfaces (e.g. the Z39.50 server at http://lcweb.loc.gov/z3950).
BEAT sponsored production of the Entrepreneur's Reference guide to Small Business Information, a bibliography of approximately 200 sources in the Library of Congress that the Reference Staff of Business Reference Services, in consultation with other areas of the Library having business subject expertise (e.g., the Business and Economics Cataloging Team), determined to be of value to those who may be involved in establishing, building, or managing a small business. The 1st edition, published in 1994, was extremely popular and all copies have been distributed. BEAT has established a task to update and expand the Entrepreneur's Guide in order to publish a second edition during 1997. Work on a print-ready version is expected to be concluded by the end of the summer. BEAT also expects to make this item available on the Library's Web site.
Library of Congress