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Ideas for Pressbooks.
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MARC Record Export #79

Open SteelWagstaff opened 6 years ago

SteelWagstaff commented 6 years ago

Feature Description

Develop an export routine that produces a basic MARC record to aid librarians in ingesting Pressbooks titles into their local library catalogues and/or into OCLC's WorldCat. MARC records are the preferred format for most library catalogues. More info about them can be found at: https://www.loc.gov/marc/umb/um01to06.html and http://www.loc.gov/nlsold/networkdocs/marc.html. The basic idea is that the MARC record could be produced using the metadata stored in a book's 'Book Info' page. In 2016, I enlisted some UW-Madison librarians to produce an initial mapping of the then-extant PB Book Info metadata fields and compare them to the basic MARC template. That document lives here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kg5GWJftTnUBj0cTB978gfI7dvSJ5sxDaej2ANE-oek/edit?usp=sharing

Feature Use Case

BCcampus & the Open Textbook Network currently produces MARC records (manually, I believe) for all the books in their library: https://open.bccampus.ca/bcoer-librarians/bc-open-textbook-marc-records/ and https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/discovery. MARC records would greatly improve/increase the discoverability of various Pressbooks titles, since they would more readily allow these books to be ingested into global library catalogues and discoverable when users search for books and other materials through library catalogue searches around the world.

Other Notes

We first discussed this years ago (back when there was a dedicated Pressbooks Metadata Slack channel, but I don't think it was ever written up as a formal feature idea. Some links and discussion of also took place after/during a PB development call in May 2016: https://pressbooks.slack.com/files/U03U27HKU/F178NS6C8/PB_Open_Source_Meeting_Agenda__14h_Eastern__May_9_2016_ + https://pressbooks.slack.com/files/U03U27HKU/F17B575LP/2016-05-09_TODOs. I was cleaning out old files and found some notes connected to this. I wanted the idea (and some of the work we did on it years ago) to have a home in case it would be of some future use.

MHCC and UTSA are particularly interested in this feature.

SteelWagstaff commented 5 years ago

@aseroff at the University of Minnesota has used this ruby-marc library to generate MARC files for the books in the Open Textbook Library. According to Andy, their book data is stored in a relational database, and they have mapped their textbook fields to the related MARC fields (with varying levels of augmentation for converting into MARC format standards) so that creating the MARC file is just a matter of incrementing through our textbook records and generating a MARC record for each.

aseroff commented 5 years ago

I've prepared a small code sample with basic usage of the ruby-marc library here.

lissertations commented 1 year ago

Are there any plans to include MARC export functionality in future sprints / updates? Being able to export MARC records from existing Pressbooks book info would be a gamechanger for metadata librarians - it would greatly improve the consistency of catalogue records for Pressbooks titles, and save us from having to manually catalogue them from scratch. I am surprised this issue has been open for so long - the apparent lack of any metadata export from Pressbooks is a concern.

The OER Metadata Rosetta Stone outlines core metadata elements and crosswalking suggestions. Happy to assist further if required.