Week 1

It’s the first week of the Fall 2024 quarter, and the start of my second Directed Fieldwork Experience.

I met with my DFW supervisor, Cate Gerhart, on Thursday. She is the head of the Monographic Cataloging Unit at the University of Washington. Together we developed learning outcomes for this experience and discussed what my fieldwork will look like.

When we met previously about doing a DFW this quarter, we had discussed me learning to catalog electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs). However, Cate was open to teaching me how to catalog other formats, so I will also be gaining experience cataloging popular music and archival collections. This will be wonderful experience to have in my pocket when I graduate and begin job-searching.

We met once more this week, where I got an introduction to the workflow involved in cataloging ETDs (and specifically education ETDs, which will be my focus). I learned that UW produces close to 1500 ETDs each year, and that there is quite a large backlog of education ETDs that multiple catalogers are working on. Each quarter, UW’s colleges gather and approve their theses and dissertations and load them into ResearchWorks via one large file, which also contains DublinCore metadata for each paper. These are transformed into MARC using an XSL transformation and MarcEdit, which are then loaded into OCLC, reviewed and cleaned up, and sent to the appropriate cataloger.

Because multiple catalogers are working on education ETDs, the library uses Alma’s sets to produce a list of the education ETDs and catalogers remove records from this list as they work on them. This tracks the records that need updating and prevents multiple catalogers from working on the same record. I learned how to update this set (although I still need permissions in Alma to do so myself), and together Cate and I looked at a record. We walked through some authority work for the student and degree supervisor and then moved into Wikidata.

Wikidata is an open source linked data platform that UW libraries utilizes. For ETDs, each student and degree supervisor is represented by a Wikidata item, which is described by Wikidata statements. These items can then be connected to each other and additional information as is relevant. Cate showed me how to create a new item in Wikidata and where to find UW’s guidance for creating items for people. At this point we realized that we had gone a half hour past our intended meeting time and so I was left with a short to-do list before our meeting next week, including getting set up in Wikidata, reading some documentation, and refreshing my memory on LCSH subject headings, creating and updating name authorities, and using OCLC Connexion.