March 26, 2009

UC San Diego Libraries response on the 583 field and its use for UC Shared Print

This response was formulated through discussion at the March 9 Cataloging Committee meeting, and responses to a subsequent draft document.  UC San Diego Libraries staff had several concerns:

(1)  The field is too complex.  This does not appear to us to be a “lightweight” solution.  There are massive amount of administrative metadata proposed to be encoded here.  These data are not of interest to the users (and the field presumably would be suppressed from public display), but are meant for backend library staff.  Even so, the field is quite confusing.  Our group felt that the 583 would be very complicated to code:  some subfields are free text, some are controlled vocabulary.  This field must be made simpler; if coding is too complex, people will not use it.  We strongly urge streamlining and simplification.

(2)  There could potentially be too many 583 fields in a record.  Coding multiple fields to describe what an institution intends to do, and then does, clutters the record far too much.  What is workflow data, or project management data doing in the MARC record?  We encourage making the $a repeatable or “overwritable” so that an institution could adjust/overwrite its one 583 when actions are taken.  As time goes on and more institutions become involved with print archiving (and as your example shows), there is the potential for having 583 fields from multiple institutions in a record.  As holdings are in bits and pieces, the record also will become longer and more complex.  It is unnecessary proliferation, as well as confusing and possibly misleading, to have each institution potentially have multiple 583 fields to record various steps in their workflow.  We know that storing this data in the Local Holdings Record has been proposed, and encourage continuing to look at this technique as a possible solution.

In conjunction with the idea of making $a repeatable, we suggest that the $3 should also be repeatable along with the $a.  Institutions would likely have different actions based on different parts of the whole; it would be nice to centralize all that within one 583.  Multi-part monographs are a specific example of when this might be useful.  The $a’s and $3’s might need to be paired so the relationship between the two are clear.

(3)  Clarity needed about use in multiple, related records.  Maybe we missed this somewhere in the documentation, but it was unclear to us whether libraries would be expected to code this field on the print record (for the material being archived), on the record for a digitized version (users/librarians might be interested to know that archived print existed), or both.

(4)  Need for Preservation and Digitization Actions information in local ILS.  Several staff members suggested that libraries should be encouraged NOT to export 583 fields into their local ILSs but to use OCLC as the only source for ascertaining these preservation commitments and information.  The data in this use of the 583 field is potentially quite volatile, and so the copies in local ILSs could quickly go out of date.  However, excluding this field could be a tricky (and perhaps impossible) implementation, since there are other uses for this field that could be desirable in a local ILS.  One could make the case for keeping Preservation and Digitization Actions information for one’s own institution in that ILS, but extending that to other                                                     institutions might be overwhelming and unnecessary.

(6)  UC implementation.  We presume that the proposed UC implementation for the JSTOR Print Archive would use and massage the data from the separate JSTOR database at UCLA/SRLF.  In so doing, we assume the work would be done there and that work on the other campuses would not be needed.  It was suggested that the Canadiana collection might be a possible test case for UC implementation.  One member suggested, alternatively, that the “endangered journals” project might be appropriate for a demonstration project.