MODS: a bumpy launch

Last week was our target date to launch the new MODS editor. On Wednesday we had a training session with the cataloging department to review workflow and familiarize the catalogers with the form. Metadata has been a bit of a bottle neck for us because the two librarians who were doing the cataloging could only devote a small amount of their time to the CDI project. In the interest of eliminating some of this bottleneck we are trying to incorporate the copy catalogers into the workflow. The guinea pig collection for the new MODS editor and the new workflow is the McAllister photograph collection, a collection of nearly 5000 historical photographs of the Burlington area.

There is a split at our library between copy catalogers and librarian catalogers, librarians do authority control work, but the copy catalogers can do a lot of the other descriptive work. I hate the idea of having more than one person touch each record, as it just slows down and complicates workflow, so to enable a smoother, hopefully more expedient workflow, we have had the “metadata” librarian create a list of 60 headings (based on the first two boxes of photos) that will then populate select menus in the MODS form. The copy catalogers will then be responsible for writing short abstracts describing photos and selecting up to 5 subject and geographic headings from the pre-selected lists.

I like this idea, because the subjects are being used mostly to generate the faceted browsing interface, and limiting the number of headings will make browsing less intimidating and increases consistency from item to item. Also, it enables more people to work on the metadata, helping us push out collections faster.

Because the copy catalogers will only be adding a short description, and selecting from a list of pre-compiled subject and geographic headings, I decided to make a simplified version of the form (see here). This links to the advanced form, but lets the copy catalogers work more efficiently on the information they need to add.

There were a number of bumps in the road getting to the final form, most of them involving LCSH. The response to the form from the catalogers was generally very positive, although there is no way for the copy catalogers to add additional headings without going through me.

Unfortunately on Friday we had a database corruption, which put off metadata work until this week. The database issues seems to have been resolved by doing a back up and restore, and I expect metadata work to start Tuesday or Wednesday.