Day/Time: Wednesday, May 18, 2:45pm – 3:45pm
Presenters
- Rebecca Bryant, Senior Program Officer, OCLC Research Library Partnership
- Terri Geitgey, Program Manager, Lever Press
- Jeff Edmunds, Digital Access Coordinator, Penn State University Libraries
Description
Research information management (RIM) systems support the aggregation of an institutional bibliography to support use cases as diverse as expertise discovery, strategic reporting, and faculty activity reviews. RIM is a rapidly growing investment area in North American research institutions, as documented in a recent OCLC Research report, oc.lc/us-rim-report.
RIM systems take advantage of metadata harvesting at scale from sources like Web of Science and Scopus to collect this institutional bibliography. However, while the ability to harvest and reuse publications metadata is good for STEM journal articles, it is poor for scholarly monographs, disproportionately impacting humanities content. In fact, metadata about scholarly monographs and their chapters rarely makes it through the academic publishing supply chain to populate the RIM profiles of their creators, even at the same institution!
This presentation will examine the leaky pipeline from publisher to numerous other systems, and ultimately to readers, where metadata is lost, garbled, and sometimes added to in unpredictable and nonstandard ways. Using examples from library-based OA book publishers, the presenters will document the problems with the publishing supply chain. They will trace this from metadata creation in a title management system, to the assignment (or not!) of persistent identifiers, on to its distribution to vendors via ONIX, then on to its collection (or not!) in integrated library systems, publication indexes, and RIM systems.
We will also discuss the imperative for persistent identifiers in scholarly publishing, both for disambiguation and machine readability. We will also engage participants in reflection about the metadata journey within their own publishing operations and seek to collectively discuss solutions that will better serve libraries, universities, and, most importantly, scholars.