I have known this to be true for years (I started out as a serials cataloger, after all), but the value of quality in metadata has recently been reinforced for me. Quality metadata is absolutely essential to building robust and flexible applications involving search, taxonomy, and retrieval of information for libraries (and for other organizations, too).

In previous posts I’ve described some of what I’ve worked on as a team with others in my library that relates to creating a better way for our users to find information. This includes “turning the catalog inside out” in order to integrate cataloging metadata (MARC) into our new portal web environment. This metadata supports several dynamically-generated A to Z lists of e-journals and e-books to which we provide access. It is also the foundation for keyword searches (what we are calling “Quick Search”) when results for e-books and e-journals are integrated with results from other kinds of library resources such as our extensive product literature database.

Using MARC data in new and more flexible ways is wonderful and exciting to me, but the excitement recently was replaced with anxiety when I realized that key pieces of data from those MARC records were not well maintained — not of good quality and reliability. This included something as deceptively simple as the ISSN(s) associated with each journal record. Once the problems were understood, I immediately outlined a project to update and, if you will, upgrade, the metadata for every e-journal to which we provide access. That’s around 1,600 “for cost” journals in addition to potentially ten times that amount in open access journals. That’s just a smidgeon of what many other libraries, especially large, academic libraries, have in terms of the scope of their e-journal collection. Still, it’s a very large amount for my library to handle and with our already lean technical services staffing, we could sure have done without the extra effort and time that’s required to apply the fixes.

When I arrived in this job I was told that cataloging standards were much looser here than in a typical academic library, and this was deemed to be “a very good thing.” Maybe so, but I can’t help feeling that a little more care and effort to follow national cataloging standards throughout the years would have saved me and my staff a lot of extra effort at this juncture. I am very thankful for such freely available software tools as Terry Reese’s outstanding MarcEdit program, with which I have been able to minimize this extra effort as much as possible.

One of the more memorable sayings from my first boss (and he was full of memorable sayings) that relates to this issue is “Don’t gild the lily.” By this he meant, let’s not waste our time trying to create the perfect cataloging record; he argued (and I agree) that there really is no such thing. I’m not saying that my predecessors should have had staff create perfect records. Rather, I am saying that more attention should be paid to key data elements to make sure they are up-to-date and accurate. I know many would say, “Oh, yeah, there’s the rub.” Meaning, the real question is, what are the key data elements to which we need to pay attention and keep in good shape, and who gets to decide that? I’ll leave my answers to those questions for a future post.