Abstract :
[en] ULiège Library has a collection of more than 1,7 million of bibliographic records in its catalog and keeps an exceptional heritage from the university's foundation in 1817: more than 41,000 items constitute our rare books and special collections.
Since the migration to the Alma library management system (Ex Libris) in 2015, we notably rely on the Alma Community Zone, a shared community catalog (bibliographic records for e-resources), resource knowledge base (linking and coverage information for e-resources), and authority vocabularies. We use different vocabularies for names and subject headings (Autorités BnF, Rameau, MeSH, French MeSH, LCNames and LCSH). Additionally, we managed a local authority file in Alma for physical names and entities when they were missing in the authority vocabularies in use.
In 2020, the French IdRef (Identifiants et Référentiels) authority vocabulary was added to Alma CZ. IdRef covers personal names, corporate names, subject headings, geographical names and is developed and maintained by the French Bibliographic Agency of Higher Education (ABES, Agence bibliographique de l'enseignement supérieur). Several dozens of French and Swiss universities and higher education institutions add, update, and contribute authority records in the IdRef database on a daily basis. Because of the scope of IdRef, ULiège Library was strongly interested in moving to this new authority control in Alma and becoming the first Belgian IdRef partner to enrich the database with new entries related to Belgian authors, ULiège researchers, and authors and creators related to items of our heritage print and digital collections.
A big part of the project consists in data curation on existing bibliographic records in order to enrich them by adding IdRef identifiers ($$0) and URIs ($$1) into 1XX, 7XX and 6XX Marc21 fields and therefore enrich the records for future linked data projects. In this respect, we improve and align our data following a homemade curation process protocol with the help of tools like Bibliostratus and OpenRefine.
For ongoing cataloging activities, we have set up a different approach. Despite the fact that IdRef records are updated every six hours in Alma CZ and are quickly available for cataloging workflows, we were strongly interested in finding a way to:
- easily create new IdRef records directly from Alma bibliographic records;
- reuse as soon as possible in Alma records newly created IdRef records;
- reduce the number of manual operations (like copy-pasting);
- easily add IdRef identifiers and URIs into 1XX, 7XX and 6XX Marc21 fields.
ULiège Library has thus developed a bookmarklet (based on JavaScript and Perl scripts on the server side) to interface the Alma library management system with the IdRef website and to allow catalogers, with a minimum of clickthroughs, to create new IdRef records directly from Alma records and to add and save IdRef identifiers and URIs into the bibliographic records. The bookmarklet can also be used by catalogers who in order to generate a request for creating an IdRef entry to the attention of the local IdRef catalogers.
