callahan princetonenug2011

Maureen Callahan & Don Thornbury

Rare Books and Special Collections

Princeton University Library

ENUG 2011

1. We believe in the possibilities of single

search.

2. But how do we represent special

collections materials?

3. And how do we make this play nicely

with Primo? (It won’t work out of the

box).

4. What are the implications of this change

and what are our next steps?

“Users can search Internet resources

through a single search engine query, yet

often the resources of a single cultural

institution or university campus are

segregated into silos, each with its own

dedicated search system.”

Single Search: The Quest for the Holy Grail – OCLC

Research Report by Leah Prescott and Ricky Erway, June

2011

Let’s say that you’re studying Orthodox Christians in Ethiopia…

So you’ll start with sources in the library collection.

Books, articles, art, archives, sound recordings, objects – the way we describe these are all records with many similarities. They all have some or all of the Dublin Core fields.

So let’s put what we can into Primo, so that our researchers only have to learn one opaque research system, instead of many.

We decided to start with special collections materials currently described in EAD.

MARC – Henriette Avram, late 1960s

EAD (Encoded Archival Description) –

UC Berkeley, 1993

Before this (and currently, too, depending

on where you are): big, long essays

explaining the collection and big, long

paper lists of the contents of the

collections.

Archival description in five minutes…

We want each piece of valuable data in the contents list to go into Primo, so that users can find it in a institution-wide search.

In fact, we’re not super nuts about the current system – users having to scroll through big-crazy-long finding aids (with the help of Ctrl-F).

We want users to be able to go straight to the part of the collection that has the information they seek.

Our content standard (DACS) tells us the

requirement for single-level records.

DACS doesn’t care about the encoding

standard – MARC, EAD, PNX, whatever.

And, as we look at each component (that

is, unit of description or line in the

contents list) we realize that each one has

the required parts to be its own record.

We’re going from one line in a finding aid

to a big PNX record.

EAD Generic.dtd PNX

You should see the massive stylesheet.

Iterative process.

It’s good to talk about theory. A lot.

It’s good to push back against Primo.

1. And PNX is how we shall come to know

our data…

2. Re-thinking the folder list.

3. Visibility for special collections.

4. De-centering both organizational

boundaries, boundaries of custody, and

boundaries of creator/collector.

5. Fidelity to FRBR model.

Getting those 650K archival records

ingested…

Working with other data sources,

converting to generic then PNX (should

be easier, since we don’t have to factor in

hierarchical relationships, usually!)

EAD site redesign

Description revolution.

cmcallah@princeton.edu

searchit.princeton.edu

findingaids.princeton.edu