[Metadatalibrarians] Automating the compilation of a bibliography

[Doreen Herold]

Hi everyone,

I just completed a project and wanted to get feedback for better methods
should a similar project come around.

A faculty member wanted a bibliography of resources our library has
available that were either authored by or in some way related to 40 persons
in a specific field. The professor provided a list of these 40 persons.

Because of the time constraint, I manually created this list. The final
result is a list of 144 titles, created and saved in our catalog, VuFind,
with the individuals' names as tags (one of our subject librarians had
started the project this way so I continued it). I used not just our local
catalog but also WorldCat, finding that they supplemented each other
because:

- some of our local records were dated and records in WorldCat had been
enhanced (e.g. TOCs, summaries, etc.) so I found titles in WorldCat that I
didn't find while searching our local catalog
- we don't have holdings set in WorldCat for all of our ebooks so I found
titles in our local catalog that I didn't find while searching WorldCat

I wondered if anyone had done a similar project more efficiently or would
have suggestions for how to tackle this. One thing I didn't do and should
have tried: create batch searches in OCLC. Does anyone have other
suggestions?

Thanks,
Doreen Herold

-- 
Doreen Herold
Library Technical Services
Lehigh University
Library & Technology Services
30 Library Drive - Bethlehem, PA - 18015
610.758.3040 - dok205 at lehigh.edu
http://library.lehigh.edu
Library Technical Services Wiki <https://confluence.cc.lehigh.edu/x/SQAR>