Home--Minutes

AJL RAS 2020 Cataloging Committee Meeting Minutes

June 25, 2020 | Zoom, 11am EDT

Old Business

1.    Welcome and introductions, approve 2019 minutes

2.    Implementation of OCLC merge project (Neil, Jasmin)

●    This is a collaborative project between our committee and OCLC, aimed at streamlining the merging of Hebrew and Yiddish duplicate bib records on WorldCat.
●    Since our start at the last AJL conference, Jasmin has gained independence. Two other catalogers are well on their way to finish as well, Sharon and Caroline
●    Robert Talbott and Neil were already independent at the start.
●    We encourage you to explore this project. You can do it individually or as an institution. It involves some online training and a limited period of review.

3.    Non-Latin Script Affinity Group – part of PCC LD4P (Jasmin, Heidi)

New Business

 
1.    Linked Data Hebraica/Jewish Studies (Neil) –

●    Last year at the conference Neil gave a short presentation on the issues faced for a Digital Humanities project tracing medieval authors in the Crown of Aragon.
●    Throughout this year we started establishing a number of authorities as items on Wikidata and linking them to VIAF and to the LC authorities.

• At the moment, the project has some 150 authors. We have created or edited Wikidata entities for 72 of them.
• After finishing this we will add another ~100 physicians of the same timeframe and location.

●    This is a long work in progress, but if you are interested, you can follow it at https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/User:Dhneil
●    Lessons learned have helped us launch several non-Judaica-specific projects at UMD’s Special Collections and University Archives and Special Collections and the Performing Arts.
●    Neil co-lead Wikidata training for a handful of traditional authority catalogers and graduate students.
●    We are collaborating with the Discovery and Metadata department regarding the integration of Wikidata entities in our metadata environment.
●    Finally, we are about to launch a UMD Wikidata interest group. Perhaps the RAS Cataloging committee will be interested in creating a similar structure in the near future.

2.     Wikidata Judaica Project (Heidi) – Heidi discussed her Wikidata Judaica project with respect to establishing an authoritative author list.

3.     Good and Welfare

(Reconstituted from memory after computer failure)