Description: This paper discusses assessing descriptive substance in free-text collection-level metadata. Abstract: Collection-level metadata has the potential to provide important information about the features and purpose of individual collections. This paper reports on a content analysis of collection records in an aggregation of cultural heritage collections. The findings show that the free-text Description field often provides more accurate and complete representation of subjects and object types than the specified fields. Properties such as importance, uniqueness, comprehensiveness, provenance, and creator are articulated, as well as other vital contextual information about the intentions of a collector and the value of a collection, as a whole, for scholarly users. The results demonstrate that the semantically rich free-text Description field is essential to understanding the context of collections in large aggregations and can serve as a source of data for enhancing and customizing controlled vocabularies.

Description: This paper discusses metadata utilization. Abstract: Metadata schemes emerge to meet community and user requirements, and they evolve over time to meet changing requirements. This paper reports results of an analysis of a large sample of MARC 21 bibliographic records. MARC 21 is an encoding scheme related closely to metadata elements occurring in library bibliographic records. The records were analyzed for the utilization of content designation available in MARC 21. Results indicate that less than 5% of available content designation accounts for over 80% of occurrences. The implications of these findings affect indexing policies, system design, and can inform setting requirements for extending a metadata scheme based on a threshold of community requirements.

Description: This paper discusses building contextual mass in digital aggregations for scholarly use. Abstract: At present there are no established collection development methods for building large-scale digital aggregations. However, to realize the potential of the collective base of digital content and advance scholarship, aggregations must do more than provide search of sizable bodies of content. Informed by empirical understanding of scholarly information practices, the IMLS Digital Collections and Content project developed an aggregation strategy for building Opening History, one of the largest digital cultural heritage aggregations in the country. The strategy applied policy-driven collecting based on the principle of contextual mass, and conspectus-style evaluation of collection-level metadata to identify strong subject areas within the aggregation. Analysis of density, interconnectedness, diversity, and small/large collection complementary determined subject concentrations and thematic strengths to be prioritized for future collection development and used as organizational structures for browsing and visualization. The approach models how scholars build their own personal research collections, as they follow leads from collection to collection across institutions near and far, and adds value that cannot be achieved through conventional retrieval and browsing at the item-level.

Description: These papers are a compilation of presentations at a conference on bibliographic control of Afro-American literature. The text includes speeches and discusses regarding the topics as well as a summary of conference recommendations.

Description: This article discusses book jackets as access mechanisms. Abstract: Book jackets provide a model for access to documents on the World Wide Web. They demonstrate a means for making available many of the representational attributes important to making relevance judgements. Such attributes have been posited for retrieval models for some time, but have not been implemented in most formal access systems. Even in the Web environment physical availability is not the same as accessibility. The attribute categories discussed here emerged from 228 book jackets for non-fiction works in a medium size academic library. Models of document searching and book jacket design are discussed in relation to the individual scholarly searcher and new modes of document searching.