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Here are just some of the current projects of the Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT), a Cataloging Directorate initiative aimed at developing tools to aid catalogers, reference specialists, and searchers in creating and locating information. Major components of the team's work are enriching the content of Library of Congress bibliographic records, improving access to the data the records contain, and conducting research and development in areas that can contribute to furthering these efforts. Additional information regarding BEAT, its work, and the projects described here may be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat
Using programming by three BEAT Team members, this project creates a web-based TOC for virtually 100% of all E-CIP records that contain TOC data. This data is created programmatically and a hot-link in the TOC to and from the underlying record in the LC Catalog is made for every item. The programs handles most diacritical marks, and also enriches the TOC web display with the LC subject headings that were applied by cataloging staff.
This process is one of the two modes in which the E-CIP TOC project operates. In the other, table of contents data is added to the body of the catalog record by catalogers and staff during the course of the regular E-CIP cataloging process. LC cataloging staff will continue to add TOC data to the catalog record according guidelines for such work. (Currently about one-third of all E-CIPs receive such treatment). This means that for some titles, data will be available on the web as well as within the record itself. As of December 2003 approximately 12,000 ECIP TOC records had been added to the web server.
This project makes links from the LC Catalog to full electronic texts of items represented in the LC collections. Two recent additions are noted.
In the most recent initiative, 379 titles represented in the Library's collections were linked to The California Digital Library (http://www.cdl.org) to eScholarship texts that have been made publicly available through the Library. The texts to which we were granted permission to link are mostly recent imprints and current scholarship, whereas prior Public Domain projects were for retrospective material primarily of historical value.
In another addition to this project, BEAT has also added links to bibliographic records for more than 35 titles from Indiana University's Victorian Women Writers Project. This additional collaboration with Indiana University links to items in a project that aims "to produce highly accurate transcriptions of works by British women writers of the 19th century, encoded using ... SGML. The works ... include anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts, children's books and volumes of poetry and verse drama."
Additional information about the Web Access to works in the Public Domain project is available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/pub.domain.html, and fuller descriptions of BEAT projects as well as information about BEAT are found at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/beat.html
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, and with programming developed by a BEAT team member, the project creates Table of Contents (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. To date the project has created about 36,000 ONIX TOC records.
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, and the project has created approximately 32,000 such records. Readers will find a sample in the ONIX description section of the BEAT web pages
The Digital Tables of Contents project creates machine readable Table of Contents (TOC) data from TOC surrogates and these materials are subsequently HTML-encoded and placed on a server at the Library. The process 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. Almost 19,000 TOCs have been created and linked, in this project and more than 2,700, 000 hits have been recorded on the TOC files section of the Cataloging Directorate Web pages.
BECITES+ ((Bibliographies plus: Enhanced Citations with Indexes, Tables of contents, Electronic resources and Sources cited) 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. 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.
The project 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, African American business, Thomas Jefferson, and materials on Immigrant Arrivals to the United States. A number of other works are in progress, covering additional business resources, guides to microfilm collections, prints and photographs resources, and manuscripts from several Middle Eastern monasteries, as well as a guide to Ladino publications in the Library of Congress. The BECites+ front page is located at <http://www.loc.gov/rr/business/guide>
This project has several facets, the first of which is to link many " working paper/discussion paper" type serial publications to their web-based electronic versions. By linking to these electronic versions, LC provides more timely, comprehensive, and cost effective access to these series. In a second area of activity the Library's Serial Record Division is creating electronic serial records for a number of high research value monographic series that have not been represented in LC's catalogs, thereby opening up a rich, new source of information for researchers who may now access electronic versions of these items. So far, these efforts have provided access to the full, electronic texts of more than 20,000 individual monographs As a further enhancement, a pilot project has been launched to create electronic resource records for the individual monographs of selected series. A number of links to examples and further description of this project can be found on the BEAT web page at <http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/beat.html>
This project will result in significantly improved access to approximately 2000 pre-1970 Congressional hearings, improving service to the Congress and addressing an important objective in the Cataloging Directorate's strategic plan. Other benefits to be derived include central, as opposed to dispersed availability of the hearings, better access to the content of the items, improved cataloging describing these hearings, and the addition of other information concerning alternate data source availability.
The project will be undertaken through the collaborative efforts of four Library units: CALM, CRS, the Cataloging Directorate, and the Law Library, with the added benefit derived from such cooperation. The methodology to be employed consists of identifying and retrieving approximately 2000 items that make up the body of these hearings, reclassifying to class KF in the Law schedules and upgrading the cataloging for the items, exploring making digital copies available for hearings in poor physical condition, re-labeling the items to reflect the new classification, and housing them in a single location, the Law Library.
To enrich access to scholarly materials, BEAT has recently undertaken a project to link catalog records for selected materials in the Library's collections to reviews for them in H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences, the online journal of H-NET: Humanities and Social Sciences Online, a resource that contains many scholarly and academic reviews. The reviews cover contemporary publications as well as classic publications in a variety of academic fields. Many of the reviews, in addition to containing relevant Library of Congress subject headings, include footnotes and bibliographies.
The initial phase of the cooperative project, begun in early 2003, has resulted in 6,173 links from Library of Congress catalog records to corresponding H-Net reviews. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 additional reviews will be added each year.
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