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Having just celebrated its 10th anniversary, Bibliographic Enrichment Advisory Team (BEAT) is 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. The team's membership represents a wide spectrum of the Library's functions reflecting the Cataloging Directorate's desire to provide benefits from its projects to as wide an audience as possible and to incorporate within its program objectives the needs and interests of various constituencies beyond those of technical services. Additional information regarding BEAT and its work may be found at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat Questions about BEAT or its projects may be directed to the BEAT Chair, John D. Byrum, Jr., Chief Regional and Cooperative Cataloging Division, Library of Congress, jbyr@loc.gov
From among the more than two dozen ongoing activities of the team at the present time, here are presented six projects demonstrating how BEAT reaches the objectives discussed above.
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 31,000 ONIX TOC records. A fuller description of the ONIX TOC project as well as brief descriptions of some other BEAT TOC initiatives can be found in "Cataloging Electronic Resources at LC" in Volume 9, no. 13 of LC CATALOGING NEWSLINE (the Online Newsletter of the Cataloging Directorate Library of Congress) November 2001, available online at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/lccn/lccn0913.html#3
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 27,500 such records, although links are currently made from the catalog record only in an ongoing fashion. Readers will find a sample at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/onix.descriptions.sample.html
Questions regarding BEAT's ONIX initiatives may be sent to David W. Williamson, project chair, at dawi@loc.gov
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 11,000 TOCs have been created and linked, in this project and more than 1,000, 000 hits have been recorded on the TOC files section of the Cataloging Directorate Web pages. For information regarding the Digital Tables of Contents project readers may contact Bruce Knarr, project chair at bkna@loc.gov
A cybercast from January 2002 prepared as part of the LC staff Digital-Future-and-You series, containing information relating to all the TOC initiatives may be viewed online at http://lcweb.loc.gov/catdir/beat/eTOC/jan30-eTOC.html
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. 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, and a number of additional works are in progress, covering 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/
Many social science series of the " working paper/discussion paper" type are now available in electronic form. The focus of this project is to identify those that are available in electronic form and add the URLs to the LC records for these series. By linking to these electronic versions, LC can provide a more timely, comprehensive, and cost effective access to these series. A corollary to this project has been the identification of numerous high research value monographic series that have not been represented in LC's catalogs. These projects create added value by leading researchers via these links to significant information resources that offer full-text and/or abstracts for many of the titles in these series. So far, these efforts have provided access to the full, electronic texts of more than 15,000 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. Questions about this project may be directed to project chair, Gabriel Horchler, ghor@loc.gov
BEAT has launched an initiative to link LC bibliographic records to full text electronic copies of these same cataloged materials residing in collections of other institutions. Though various institutions have digitized these works, all in the public domain, many of the original printed works are also in the collections of the Library of Congress. By linking LC catalog records to these electronic versions the Library expects to provide users with more unified and centralized access to materials of this nature as well as provide users of the LC collections or of LC catalog data rich and substantive information about the contents of these works as well as access to their texts. The first links to resources come through cooperative agreements with the University of Michigan (for materials digitized in its Making of America project, described at http://moa.umdl.umich.edu/ and Indiana University (works comprising its Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875 project), described at http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/
In order for records to qualify for enhancement in these projects, the electronic versions have to be an exact version of a print version represented in the Library's collection, as established by the presence of an Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) for the electronic version that matches the LCCN for the print version. For the University of Michigan materials, it proved possible to enhance 1,267 LC bibliographic records, and for the Indiana University project 653 LC bibliographic records were linked to the online versions. Further description of the project is available on the BEAT web page, through access to the Michigan and Indiana sites noted in the first paragraph above and a sample is available by clicking on the hot link in the example at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/beat/sample.pubdomain.html
The Library is interested in joining with other trusted partners in linking printed and digitized texts. Prospective partners are invited to contact BEAT chair, John D. Byrum, at jbyr@loc.gov This page updated February 12, 2003
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