The Dilemma of Access: Describing Open Access Journals with MARC and [Other] Metadata Schemes, Summary of a Presentation by Monica Berger and Gloria Rohman
B. (2007). The Di lemma of Access: Describing Open Access Journals with MARC and [Other] Metadata Schemes
Berger and Gloria Rohman The D ilemma of Access: Describing Open Access Journals with MARC and [Other] Metadata Schemes, Summar y of a Presentation by Monica
Beth Evans
Brooklyn College
Follow this and additional works at: http://academicworks.cuny.edu/ulj Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Recommended Citation
-
The Dilemma of Access: Describing Open Access Journals with MARC
and [Other] Metadata Schemes, Summary of a Presentation by Monica
Berger, New York City College of Technology, CUNY and Gloria
Rohman, New York University
Monica Berger and Gloria Rohmann bring to the open access discussion the
librarian’s point of view, both from the standpoint of the cataloger (Berger) and of
the position of the public access librarian (Rohmann).
The speakers define what content is likely to be found in open access
journals. Some OA journals offer published material, in its final form. The
publisher may offer all content, for all years of the publication, freely. Some, as in
the case of Highwire, may embargo selected years. Other journals include pre-print
material, or articles that continue to see the light of day as they go through two or
more stages of revision. Journals that publish pre-prints are often hybrid journals
that contain finished articles as well. Pre-prints force us as librarians to look at the
issue of versioning, or, determining which is the correct or final or desired version of
a work. Unpublished material, such as what might appear on an author’s web site
but not in a journal, (e.g., an unpublished conference paper or the invisible college,
as Rohmann calls it, i.e., the informal communication between scholars, fill out the
arena of open access, scholarly communication. Typically, though, in the open access
discussion, the content is offered through a commercial vendor and select parts are
offered freely.
When authors archive their own material, in an ideal world, they will adhere to the
standard, the open archives initiative protocol for metadata harvesting to enhance
findability. The Sherpa Project (http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/) was instrumental in
achieving this goal – of using OAI-PMH -- for a number of institutions developing
local repositories. OAIster (http://www.oaister.org/), a union catalog of digital
resources, makes use of the same protocol and includes a significant number of
nonarticle materials.
The important consideration for both technical and public services librarians is to
learn whether “open access content will find its way into the OPAC and other
bibliographic tools and [whether] bibliographic utilities [will] continue to function
successfully as unique catalogs… [W]ill all this Web-born content bypass our
world?” (Berger) Literature is falling from the hands and control of librarians. The
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a good example of how portions of the
available literature are not passing through the hands of librarians before coming
into the public eye. Many titles are missing from the DOAJ. Librarians are not
putting locally produced e-title publications into OCLC. The catalog itself may be
endangered. Nevertheless, a good sign is that the Library of Congress is using
MARCXML, which is a version of XML that very neatly maps to MARC. Other
schemes include MODS, which is essentially a smaller version of the same thing,
but it is not equivalent to MARC, and MADS, or, metadata authority description
scheme. Another good sign is OCLC’s loading bibliographic references into Google.
These will lead people back to the OPAC. Google Scholar is useful in that it clusters
things and link resolvers will lead users to the library’s catalog. The time may come
to reverse the role of the library with the OPAC. The goal will be to map from an
indexing and abstracting service to your holdings rather than mapping your
holdings to your abstracting services. Consider the example of Cornell. CU did a
project where they took XML metadata and mapped it back to the
catalog. The University of Illinois developed software that lets translates MARC to
different metadata schema and back. Currently, libraries seem happy enough to
get MARC records tape-loaded or dumped and not concern themselves too much
with quality.
Another channel for finding open access mat
identifier. The problem with DOI is that not many titles are registered with DOI,
and these are a minority of those journals, particularly outside the biomed or
physics and math areas. DOI establishes a persistent link to a digital object, and
provides a container which can accommodate any existing identifier. Existing
identifier meaning ISBN, ISSN, or simply some kind of abbreviated name of the
journal and the date of the issue. DOIs are no good unless you can resolve them to
actually get an article. And DOI resolution is provided by the first part of that URL
that you see http://doi.org. The journal URL (...truncated)