Can RDA Content, Media, and Carrier Coding Improve Discovery Facet Mapping?

Abstract

T he online public catalog interface of the Z. Smith Reynolds Library at Wake Forest University (WFU) has provided users with the option of faceted searching since 2009. Although faceting is undoubtedly useful to the discovery process, we found that our system's default facet mapping was inadequate for our researchers' needs, particularly regarding the faceting of bibliographic formats, and our librarians have worked extensively to revise this mapping. These revisions have relied on creating complex decision trees, which require the system to consult multiple fields and subfields in bibliographic records, to assign more precise format facets. When our authority control vendor, Backstage Library Works, offered to add Resource Description and Access (RDA) coding to our bibliographic records, including the new Content, Media, and Carrier Type (CMC) fields that describe formats with greater granularity than the General Material Designation (GMD), we questioned whether the new coding could be used to improve the format faceting in our public catalog. With this research question in mind, we sent our bibliographic records to Backstage for RDA enrichment. SettingLocated in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, WFU is a private institution with approximately 4,800 undergraduate and 2,800 graduate students. Three libraries-a medical library, a law and professional library, and the Z. Smith Reynolds Library (ZSR)-support the university's academic activities. ZSR, the largest of the three libraries, serves both undergraduate and graduate students in WFU's ZSR currently holds approximately 1.9 million print volumes and provides access to more than fifty thousand electronic journals (e-journals) and almost eight hundred thousand electronic books (e-books). Nonprint collections (film, microform, music, digital, etc.) and the university's archival and special collections (rare books and manuscripts) are also housed in ZSR. Additionally, ZSR has been a selective depository for US government documents since 1902. The library is organized into seven departments-Administration, Access Services, Digital Scholarship, Research and Instruction, Resource Services, Special Collections and Archives, and Technology-that regularly collaborate on library projects and initiatives, including the focus of this case study and analysis.ZSR's integrated library system is Ex Libris' Voyager, and ZSR has used VuFind, an open source discovery system developed by Villanova University, since 2009 as its primary online catalog interface. With sophisticated indexing and versatile searching capabilities, VuFind enables ZSR librarians to customize the catalog experience via a number of algorithmic parameters, including variables in the SolrMarc software used to index MARC metadata. Moreover, VuFind provides progressive search refinements within sets of search results via multiple flexible query facets.RDA for original cataloging was adopted at ZSR in December 2013, after accepting RDA for copy cataloging at an earlier date. These relatively small additions of RDA...

Nawigacja fasetowa w polskich bibliotekach naukowych

“…Dodatkowe problemy sprawia wielość synonimów na oznaczenie tych grup, takich, jak kategoria, atrybut, klasa, pojęcie lub filtr (La Barre, 2012, p. 96). W efekcie wybór faset do stosowania w OPAC bardziej zależy od stosowanego formatu rekordu bibliograficznego (zazwyczaj MARC) niż tradycyjnej analizy fasetowej (Sokvitne, 2006;McCallum et al, 2017), pomimo krytyki takiego postępowania (Broughton & Slavic, 2007, p. 731). Jak pisze Le Barre (2007) projektanci i implementatorzy systemów fasetowych w swojej pracy nie przejmują się zbytnio zasadami tradycyjnej analizy i klasyfikacji fasetowej.…”

RDA Implementation in Large US Public Libraries

“…Although they judged the CMCs to be more granular and specific than GMDs, they found that "CMCs alone do not provide for sufficiently robust faceting of public catalog searches," primarily because of their ILS's limitations and the MARC format. 44 Other libraries addressed the issue by hybridizing catalog records, with some adding GMDs to their RDA records and many others retrospectively adding the 33X fields to their AACR2 records. 45 Mississippi State University's catalogers took this approach one step further, concluding that retaining GMDs was the best way to support user tasks, but also determined that an even more effective solution was to update legacy GMD terms with more item-specific terms.…”