April 18, 2023

Tuesday, May 23rd - 24th, 2023

Share your ideas and your expertise with your colleagues in the WRLC community! The Annual Meeting concurrent sessions are designed to provide you or a group of your Consortium colleagues an opportunity to share what you know with others in the Consortium. Each concurrent session lasts 45 minutes. Proposals that incorporate interaction, discussion, and creativity are encouraged.

Submit your Annual Meeting concurrent session proposal by Friday, Apr 21, 2023

Improving Physical Item Editor management

The Alma/Primo Advisory Committee's (APAC) April Idea of the Month is a BOGO! It features two ideas which can improve working with the physical item editor. Those two items are below:

1. Enable all tabs and fields to be editable without clicking on 'save and edit' button – Currently after you click on 'Add item' and being navigated to the 'Physical Item Editor' form, not all the fields and tabs (General, ENUM/CHRON, Notes, and History) are enabled for editing, the barcode no. is not populated automatically, and the dropdown list of process type is disabled as well. Only after clicking on 'save and edit' button, the complete form, including the tabs are enabled for editing. Therefore, each time you need to add an item, you have to go through 2 phases: 1) fill a limited number of fields and click on 'save and edit' 2) edit more fields, choose process type, and add public/internal notes (if needed) and click on 'save'. This workflow is extremely long and if all tabs and fields were enabled for editing in one flow, it would make the whole process faster, easier and prevent users from making mistakes, in cases where they forgot to fill some fields.

   
   

2. Add 'Save as Default' button – Cataloguers who most of the time handle the same material type or fill/choose the same content for several fields (including process type) and, etc. would be glad if there was an option to save the content of number of fields as a default, so they don't have to fill them for each item. I'm aware there's already an idea to add templates to handle this, but I believe this will extend the workflow, because when the cataloguer wants to add an item, first he'll be directed to a screen where he has to choose to load from a template (same as it works with POL's templates) and only then he can fill out any missing data in the form, such as receiving date, enumerations, description, and etc. Hence, the 'Save as Default' button will solve this long workflow and save precious time, so if the user would like to save fields with content and update them from time to time (similar to how it worked in Aleph), he can do it easily and quickly.

Ex Libris hosts the Idea Exchange to enable customers to influence the development of new features and solutions. Anyone with an Idea Exchange login can use their 25 votes to support their favorite ideas. Each month, the WRLC Alma/Primo Advisory Committee (APAC) will highlight an idea and encourages you to vote for it to raise its visibility. If you don't have an Idea Exchange account, just find the "New here? Create an account" link on the idea page. Then enter your email address to start the account creation process.

APAC welcomes nominations for future Ideas of the Month. Anyone can highlight an idea on the WRLC Idea Exchange Basecamp or you can submit ideas to your APAC representative.

- Aaron Krebeck (WRLC)

On behalf of the Alma/Primo Advisory Committee

In years past, WRLC had registered our consortia’s shared print retention commitments in OCLC for items marked as Permanent, as well as for our shared print periodicals. This retention statement is visible in OCLC’s FirstSearch and Worldshare Record Manager; the statements allow WRLC to advertise our obligation to retain a particular title.

Now in addition to our periodicals and Permanent items, we have registered all WRLC items marked as Retention for our participating institutions (American University, Catholic University of America, Gallaudet University, Georgetown University, George Washington University, Howard University, Marymount University, and the University of the District of Columbia). A little less than 3 million WRLC shared print commitments are now visible in various OCLC platforms.

-Jackie Saavedra (WRLC)

Reparative Cataloging Updates

This past month the preferred term correction job in Alma made three changes:

• Headings with “Slaves” has now changed to “Enslaved persons”; examples “Slaves’ writings” is now “Enslaved persons’ writings” and “Women slaves” is now “Enslaved women”.

• “Albinos” and “Albinism” has been updated to either “People with albinism” or “Albinism”

• “Giants” changed to either “Giants (Folklore)” or “Tall people”

You may continue to see non-preferred headings as the preferred term correction may not have corrected every instance. If you see other headings you feel should be updated, changed, or that the WRLC catalog is lacking, please submit the heading via the Reparative description heading reporting form.

Highlights of reparative work around the profession of possible:

• CORE IG week was held the week of March 6, 2023. All recordings are available to all on-demand. Interest groups that had sessions of possible interest:

• Cataloging & Classification research (slides | recording)

• Metadata (slides | recording)

• Role of the professional librarian in tech services (recording)

• Instructional technologies (slides | recording)

• Cataloging norms (slides | recording)

• ITAL (Information Technology and Libraries) v. 42, no. 1 (2023)

• Avgousti, A., & Papaioannou, G. (2023). The Current State and Challenges in Democratizing Small Museums’ Collections Online. Information Technology and Libraries, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v42i1.14099

• Park, H., & Kim, H. (2023). Japanese Military “Comfort Women” Knowledge Graph. Information Technology and Libraries, 42(1). https://doi.org/10.6017/ital.v42i1.15799

• Critcatenate does a monthly round up of blog posts, articles, and webinars.

• OCLC’s blog “Hanging Together” has a monthly segment, Advancing IDEAs, which covers topics and links out to additional resources.

The Reparative Cataloging Subgroup holds open meetings the last Wednesday of every month. Meeting announcements are made on the Metadata Committee Basecamp, but all are welcome to attend. For more information, contact chair Jen Froetschel at jfroetschel@gwu.edu.

ASERL Sponsored Professional Development Activities

ASERL offers a wide variety of webinars at no cost for members and other interested professionals. Follow the linked program title for full details and to register for an event.  

NOTE:  ASERL’s Code of Conduct is in effect for all webinar participants. See http://www.aserl.org/aserl_code_of_conduct/.  ASERL webinars are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

• Equipment Coordinator and Access Services Specialist - Georgetown University

• Associate University Librarian for Learning, Research, & Engagement - George Mason University

• Course Reserves Coordinator - American University

• Instruction & Online Learning Librarian (Instruction Team Coordinator) - Marymount University

• Media Services Coordinator - American University

• Access and Education Librarian, Department Head - Marymount University

View this email in your browser