Scope e-Knowledge Center (Scope), a leading provider of content enhancement and knowledge services, recently completed an assignment with Taylor & Francis (T&F) to create MARC records for XML archives across 15 categories of publication types, including journals, books, reports and acts based on RDA guidelines for their cutting-edge digital resource, the South Asia Archive, developed in association with the South Asia Research Foundation in response to growing demand from researchers for new online research, learning and teaching resources relating to South Asia.
Scope employed its mARCat™ platform to efficiently execute the assignment and meet the expectations of T&F. Scope’s mARCat solution has the ability to create MARC records per the latest RDA rules. The output was then validated by subject matter experts (SMEs), who are experienced library professionals, to ensure quality and robustness required by T&F.
The project involved encoding special characters of non-English language using MARC8 and UTF-8 character encoding, mapping of metadata in input XML files with output template fields expected by T&F, conversion of MARC records to MARCXML format as per the LOC XML schema and single XML output with all output MARC records.
Gillian Howcroft, Director, eProducts commented, “From our earlier focus groups with librarians when developing the South Asia Archive, librarians requested MARC 21 records for easy integration with their library OPAC’s to increase the discoverability and accessibility of this resource. As a result of this feedback, we commissioned Scope to create MARC 21 records in RDA format for the South Asia Archive, now available. We are extremely happy with the quick turnaround and quality of these records from Scope”.
Tram Venkatraman, President of Scope, said, “We are happy to be associated with a leading publisher like Taylor & Francis to provide MARC services. Scope processed around 30,000 input XML files within a time period of one month to help T&F launch their new platform, the South Asia Archive, a fully-searchable digital archive resource providing instant access to over 4 million pages of rare and valuable research across the humanities and social sciences.
Commenting on this partnership, Joseph Ranjan, Associate Vice President and Head of Scope’s Data Services and Business Research divisions, noted, “Scope has built mARCat based on its experience over a number of years. mARCat employs Scope’s proven ‘assisted automation’ approach, combining proprietary technology with SME intervention to deliver high-quality, accurate results, faster for our customers.”
