Optimized metadata repurposing in a library using MarcEdit

Abstract

At WSU Libraries, Special Collections and Technical Services had been creating in-house inventories in Excel and MARC records in OCLC separately for their projects, including for a collection of 1800 poems by American poet Albert Goldbarth. This presentation will address how we repurposed those brief Special Collections Excel records, enriching and manipulating this metadata before transforming it into MARC for loading into OCLC and our local Voyager catalog. In a similar workflow, metadata describing ETDs had been captured for our institutional repository and for OCLC separately. By harvesting DC metadata from DSpace/SOAR (Shocker Open Access Repository) and transforming it using XSLT in MarcEdit, we were able to automate the process of creating MARC records for OCLC. Both cases of metadata repurposing promote the sharing and reuse of metadata resources in different systems and greatly improve our cataloging workflow.

This presentation will analyze the tools utilized to perform the transformation, Delimited Text Translator, Metadata Harvester, and MarcEdit developed by Terry Reese. It will discuss some common challenges in metadata mapping and transformation, and what we did to resolve some of the issues in our cases. It will also address data integrity, data loss, and data maintenance issues across the resulting metadata repositories.