Summary:
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 Unpublished material, such as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unpublished conference paper or the invisible college, as Rohmann calls it,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 non-article 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
Another channel for
finding open access material is the DOI digital object 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 can change, but the DOI stays the same.
FRBRization is a
cataloging process where items that it actually considers are grouped. FRBR was
discussed by IFLA in 1997. The whole
point behind it is to show relationships and hierarchy. FRBRization has four
levels of specificity, the item, manifestation, expression and work.
When an item is the most concrete, the work is then abstracted. FRBR will
improve how catalogs work. It’s going to provide this hierarchical, easy to
digest display. We can’t catalog individual titles at that kind of vast level.
And then we have different physical and intellectual versions of same article.
We want to connect the different levels of the entities, ---- the supplements,
and show title change history.
As technology
develops, consolidation will reduce the number of standards. Interoperability
will remain key. The current mix of standards don’t necessarily match each
other, but they match to each other at least decently so you can translate
things one to the other.
Rohmann’s concluding comments sum up the discussion. She sees the OPAC developing in number of different ways, FRBR emerging as important and greater interoperability coming with XML. ERMs, electronic resource management systems, will become integrated with interlibrary systems. Standards and adding identifiers will become more cohesive. Most importantly, though, user behaviors on the Web will change the way librarians work