Two weeks visits 1 - Digital collections

Over the past two weeks I also visited a few other people in the library to continue to further my understanding of what different career paths are open to me.

One person I met manages the digital collections at the library. Her position clearly involved a wide variety of tasks - administrative (managing staff, maintaining the budget, applying for grants), technical (metadata for the collections, systems administration for the repositories)

We discussed the way that she structures the metadata for the collections. Each collection has it's own custom metadata fields that are then mappable onto Dublin Core for interoperability with other systems.

We also discussed the how people discover items in the digital collection. She told me that a vast majority of users are finding the digital collections via Google. I think the digital collections need greater visibility to end users in the library (including other librarians such as the reference librarians). We discussed whether this should be done by adding electronic resource records to the existing catalog or having a higher level meta-catalog that can search the "print catalog" and the "digital collections" catalog as well as any other "catalogs" that ought to exist to capture the unique elements of other formats and types of items.

I also met with the inter-library loan librarian. She walked me through the request and fulfillment process. We discussed her role in the process and how how the process can go awry since much of it is automated at this point. One interesting problem that came up was that more people are now able to find that a wide variety of material exists globally thanks to services such as WorldCat. But it isn't always clear to the (unsophisticated) end-user where that material is held. As a result the ILL load is increasing, and more requests are for items that are held in distant or unreachable places. Which raises the question, how useful is it for the patron to be able to discover an item that exists only in two archives in Russia that won't be lending their items to a library in Oregon?