DEI Subject Heading Enhancements at Deschutes Public Library
In this webinar, Casey Cheney, Vice President, Automation Services at Backstage Library Works, and Emily O’Neal, Technical Services Manager at Deschutes Public Library, explain how they applied the concepts of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) to change problematic terminology within the library catalog.
Hear a firsthand account of how a library can start building a more inclusive catalog that serves all users.
The ALA Youth Media Awards
The ALA Youth Media Awards (YMAs) have been a mainstay of the ALA Midwinter Meeting for decades. Committees have gathered to discuss and vote, and awards have traditionally been announced on the conference’s Monday morning. As the association planned the change from Midwinter to this year’s inaugural LibLearnX production, the awards ranked high among the […]
Authority Control in the Academic Library
Every heading and cross-reference in an authority record adds to your catalog’s web of access points, enhancing discovery and putting relevant content into a patron’s hands.
Maintaining authorized name and subject headings across thousands or even millions of records is a perpetual challenge. Automation makes authority control manageable, but some librarians are hesitant to turn their catalogs over to a one-size-fits-all algorithm.
We believe that partnering with an authority control vendor should give you more control over your catalog, not less.
In this webinar, Backstage’s Casey Cheney explores factors that affect an academic library’s authority control needs. She discusses common processing choices among our academic library clients and how to select these options in your Backstage profile.
Do You Know These 18 Controlled Vocabularies?
Most catalogs use Library of Congress name and subject headings to optimize patron searches. Many libraries use at least a few other controlled vocabularies that relate to areas of emphasis in their collections. And headings from other authority files are likely to find their way into your records from shared sources of catalog metadata. Backstage’s […]
4 Ways to Lighten Your Collections Management Workload
Collection management projects like RFID tagging, reclassification, inventory, and moving may involve handling nearly every item in a library’s collection. To meet your library’s project requirements, we offer four tiers of on-site services.
Digitization, Metadata, and CONTENTdm: Partnering to Build Your Digital Collections
When preparing to outsource a digitization project, what exactly should you expect? What advantages does your vendor bring to the table? Which steps will you outsource, and which steps might your staff handle in-house to reduce costs?
In this webinar, Caitlin Costalas, digitization project manager at Backstage Library Works, and Kelly Barrall, vice president of digitization services, offer a vendor perspective on preparing for digitization projects. They’ll also answer your questions.
Topics include:
- Identifying your audience so you can plan to meet your users’ needs.
- Organizing your collection to minimize material preparation costs from your vendor.
- Leveraging a vendor’s capacity to scale up digital image production.
- Choosing sources of metadata and defining what information will be collected.
- Working with a vendor to build your CONTENTdm collection.
Implementing RFID Without Turning Your Library Upside Down
When your library implements an RFID system, the RFID tag is the least expensive piece of hardware. But with tens or hundreds of thousands of tags to be placed, tagging your collection is the stage of implementation that will take the most time and has the most potential to disrupt staff workflows and interfere with patron access to your collection.
Issues to address range from planning how to manage consistency and quality control, to deciding whether to close the library during tagging, to establishing workflows for intercepting untagged items while the collection continues to circulate.
In this webinar, Jacob Bastian, vice president of on-site services at Backstage Library Works, walks you through these decisions and highlights areas that need your attention from the early planning stages.
