Report from the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) for ALA June 2002, Atlanta, GA

About BEAT

The Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) was formed in December 1992 as a Cataloging Directorate program to develop tools to aid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchers in creating and locating information. The Team seeks to enrich the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records as well as improve access to the data the records contain, and conducts research and development in areas that can contribute to furthering these efforts. Additional information regarding BEAT and its work may be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat

BEAT Team Activities: Information for the LC ALA Report:

ONIX TOC

ONIX (Online Information eXchange) is a means of representing book industry product information and is being used by some publishers today to communicate that data electronically.

The Library receives this data directly, including coverage of some retrospective material. Programming developed by a BEAT team member utilizes the data to create Table of Contests (TOC) records that the Library makes available on the Web. Hyper-links are made from this TOC data to the catalog record, and the reverse, thus allowing researchers to move from or to the Library's online catalog where they can make additional searches for related or other material. A catalog record with a related TOC file retrieved in an online search has the hot-link to the TOC displayed on screen. As in the Digital TOC project described below, Library of Congress subject headings from the catalog record are added to the HTML keyword meta tag.

To date the project has created more than 30,000 ONIX TOC records, and the links to these from the catalog are being made in ongoing fashion.

Additional information about the ONIX TOC project is available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/lccn/lccn0912.html#3

ONIX Descriptions

An outgrowth of the ONIX TOC initiative is the creation of records that contain publisher’s descriptions of books. Based on ONIX encoded materials, file creation and linking is similar to that of the ONIX TOC initiative above. To date, the project has created approximately 20,000 such records, although links are currently made from the catalog record only in an ongoing fashion. It is anticipated that introduction of additional system capabilities within the near future will permit the timely creation of such links and in increasing volume.

Some examples will be found at .http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/onix.descriptions.sample.html

Digital Tables Of Contents (D-TOC)

The data used by the Digital Tables of Contents start out as hard copy – the project creates machine readable Table of Contents (TOC) files from TOC surrogates and those materials are subsequently processed using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). Using programming developed by the team, the information is HTML-encoded and placed on a Web server at the Library. The process also cross-links the TOC to underlying catalog records.

Both the catalog records themselves and the linked TOC data may be viewed through a Web browser by accessing the Library's online catalog access options. The pervasive availability of Web indexing and search software also makes catalog and TOC records available from almost anywhere on the Web. At present 4,000 D-TOCs have been created and linked, and more that 700,000 hits have been recorded on these TOC files. With the recent appointment of a full-time staff member to this project and with additional support from cataloging staff, the team anticipates accelerating production significantly during the second half of 2002.

Although DTOC coverage extends to books in almost all subject fields, the inclusion of materials that have been selected by LC subject specialists and others adds significant value and highlights the uniqueness of this effort in moving beyond more general selection criteria.

More details and current status the D-TOC project is available from a fuller description of the project at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/digitoc.html

A Web Cybercast, dealing with these and other BEAT TOC initiative is now available for public viewing at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/eTOC/jan30-eTOC.html

Additional Web Access To Publications in Series Project

Many social science monographic series of the "working paper/discussion paper" type are now available in electronic form. Selecting from among titles LC has (of those within scope for this project) that are available in electronic form, this BEAT project adds the URLs to the LC records for these series. By linking to the electronic versions, LC can provide more timely, comprehensive, and cost-effective access to these series. To date, with 100 links now created, the project has provided access to thousands of individual titles within the series that are available in digitized formats. More information about the project, as well as some sample data is available at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/analytics.html

BECites+ (Bibliographies plus: Enhanced Citations with Indexes, Tables of contents, Electronic resources and Sources cited)

BECITES+ enhances staff-produced bibliographies, and the catalog records for the titles included in such bibliographies, by adding links to their tables of contents, indexes, and sources cited. The project is an outgrowth of another continuing BEAT Project, the Digital Table of Contents project to enhance the catalog records of selected monographs in business and economics with links to their scanned tables of contents. It uses scanning and OCR to substantially enrich these traditional printed bibliographies. Links in the catalog records are made for each type of data file created for the work in question as well as between all the related files for any work for which a Web file is included.

Completed works within this project include guides on business history, Thomas Jefferson, and materials on Immigrant Arrivals to the United States. Works in progress cover guides to film collections and manuscripts from monasteries on Mount Athos, additional resources on business, and a guide to Ladino publications in the Library of Congress. Another recent initiative has been the scanning and conversion to text of heavily used, but out-of-print guides to Library collections whose individual items are not easily identified in the Library’s online catalog.

Information concerning the titles in the project are available online, and further details about the project as well as a full list of completed bibliographies and other work in progress can be found at http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/guide/

Inquiries concerning any BEAT project may be addressed to the BEAT Chair, John D. Byrum, Jr., at jbyr@loc.govor by direct e-mail to any of the project chairs whose addresses are available following the project descriptions on the World Wide Web at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/beat.html

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