Dimensions of Discovery: Information Retrieval and the User Experience
The Catalog Form and Function Interest Group will host two presentations.
1. Harnessing the power of MARC data to improve discoverability of accessible materials, presented by Teressa Keenan, University of Montana
“Libraries are just buildings full of books I can’t read” – or are they? It’s not enough for libraries to purchase accessible materials; students need to know if the titles they find in the catalog are available in a usable format. This presentation will provide an overview of some of the ways in which the Mansfield Library at the University Of Montana has used bibliographic data in MARC fields containing accessibility information to make it easier for students to find accessible resources. The main focus is on physical books and media. Specific MARC tags include: 532 – Accessibility Note, 341 – Accessibility Content, 008 23 – Form of item, and some local fields we created in Alma/Primo.
2. Highlighting diversity in our collections: one solution to identify and make titles discoverable, presented by Josh Hutchinson, Cynthia Johnson and Kelsey Brown, University of California-Irvine (UCI) Libraries
The UCI Libraries wanted to highlight the collections’ diverse materials but faced the following problems: how do we define diversity and how do we determine whether a specific title should be highlighted to patrons? Also, once we identify materials, how do we make them discoverable? Our solution: we tried two processes using the built-in functions in Ex Libris’ Primo VE and Alma systems. The first process used Primo VE’s user-generated tagging feature and involved the following workflow: identify lists of award-winning titles and add tags to the records in Primo VE. The second process used Primo VE’s Collection Discovery feature to highlight each of the book lists. This second workflow added the award information to the catalog record which allowed us to create a set in Alma and then create a collection that displays in Primo VE.
Learn more about the Catalog Form and Function Interest Group.
Contacts: Jim Hahn (jimhahn@upenn.edu); Bela Gupta (bgupta@umassd.edu)