Abstract
What You Can Do to Help Promote Transparency in Discovery -- and Why
NISO recently updated the Open Discovery Initiative Recommended Practice (https://www.niso.org/publications/rp-19-2020-odi), which outlines best practices for working with library discovery services. It defines ways for libraries to assess the level of content provider participation; streamlines the process by which libraries, content providers and discovery service providers work together; defines models for “fair” linking; and suggests usage statistics that should be collected for libraries and for content providers. The recommendations in this document, created by members of the Open Discovery Initiative Standing Committee, enable libraries, discovery service providers, and content providers to work together to the full extent of their abilities—providing the most effective and rich experience to end users.
In this presentation, you will learn about the Open Discovery Initiative, what changes were included in the 2020 revision of the ODI Recommended Practice, and delve more deeply into several areas: free-to-read content, fair linking, and the key elements included in the newly added library conformance statements.
Better metadata makes a difference
Libraries create, ingest and use metadata for a variety of purposes and activities, including supporting end user discovery of resources and collections. In order to successfully facilitate resource discovery, librarians must ensure that the metadata in their systems and discovery layers is standardised, accurate and as complete as possible; otherwise, their collections can be rendered essentially invisible to the user.
In order to improve metadata visibility and quality, librarians need initial and continuing technical training. Dr Diane Pennington will discuss how she provides training in metadata, cataloguing, and library systems in the MSc Information & Library Studies course at the University of Strathclyde’s iSchool. She will also provide an overview of her students’ broad range of applied and theoretical metadata research in order to illustrate the need for critically-informed, evidence-based metadata practice and implementation.
You will then hear from Emma Booth about the National Acquisitions Group Quality of Shelf-Ready Metadata Project, which collected data from UK academic libraries about their experiences with vendor-produced metadata for books and e-books. This case study serves to illustrate how poor quality metadata has a genuinely negative impact upon libraries and their users. It also demonstrates that the development and adoption of standards related to metadata quality is in the interests of everyone involved in the supply and use of library content because all stakeholders in the supply chain stand to benefit from ‘better’ richer metadata that can effectively bridge the gaps between information and communities.
