CS 501 Software Engineering Spring 2003 Project Concepts Cornell University Library

Client

Ross Atkinson, Associate University Librarian (ra13@cornell.edu) [Off-campus until Tuesday, January 28]
Yoram Szekely, Olin Library, head of collection development (ybs1@cornell.edu)

Project outline

The Library of Congress (LC) makes all of its catalog records available online. Cornell University Library uses those online records to help produce the library's own catalog records.  The library uses LC records as sources for selection, since LC finds materials from all over the world, and the only way to know about some of those titles is because LC has acquired them and the library want to order some of them for Cornell's collection. 

For the past 50 years or so (maybe a bit less), Cornell has purchased all of the LC catalog records on 3" x 5" cards, so that the selectors could look at them and select from them and, believe it or not, Cornell still buys those records in that form. It costs a lot of money to buy LC records on card stock, and the library obviously wants to stop, but the library has so far no effective way to take LC's records and make them accessible periodically by subject, so that individual selectors can use them to select from. (This is quite different from the needs of cataloging, where the cataloguers want to search all LC records on the basis of a title in hand. The selectors want records periodically on their particular subjects.) 

What is needed, in other words, is to take a file of LC records, and make them accessible in an easily useable Web site, with the facility to send individual records to the appropriate acquisitions department, so that they can simply take those records and use them as a basis for ordering and cataloging. The library has done some preliminary work on this and has developed some methods to segregate the records. The new system could either build on that or scrap it, depending upon how well it works. 

But the main problem is to create an effective interface for selectors, which would also allow records to be sent by selectors all over the campus to their appropriate acquisitions departments. This would require working with a group of selectors; each of them is different and has somewhat different needs, so the Web interface would need some flexibility. Also there would be a need to work with acquisitions on the other end, to ensure that what they need from the records would be automatically sent to them when a selector selects a record. 

There are real savings to be gained. It would not only save buying the cards, but could also save some serious time in the acquisitions departments.

Last changed: January 22, 2003