Academic publisher Cambridge University Press has reportedly embarked on a huge project to improve the discoverability of resources and ensure that the MARC (MAchine-readable cataloging) records across all eBooks are impeccable. A MARC record is the bibliographic record a library needs for their online catalogues – the online description of a resource, coded according to a specific format. Once a MARC record is uploaded in a library catalogue users are able to find it and have access to the resource described within.
Over the last year, Cambridge University Press has been through almost all its collections – over 24,000 titles – and updated or enhanced the metadata according to the requirements of librarians and researchers. The Press has added in subject headings where there were none, authorised forms of authors'/editors' names and series titles and removed punctuation marks that affected search capabilities.
While many publishers use electronically generated algorithms to produce their MARC records, or ship out metadata to a third party supplier, the Press's records have also all been updated manually, in-house.
Over the next year, there will be further investment in this project to bring the best resources directly to librarians, and to improve discoverability of Cambridge published materials, which should make for many happy users and happy librarians.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
