Name Disambiguation for Digital Collections: Planning a Linked Data App for Authority Control at Texas A&M University Libraries

Presented at the LD4 Conference on Linked Data in Libraries, Boston, MA, on May 11, 2019.This presentation describes plans that are being made for the creation of an “authority control” app for names within repositories at Texas A&M University. The purpose of this app is to serve as a tool for library staff, external metadata providers, and repository users to identify and disambiguate individual persons, as well as link to contextual data in external sources (e.g., Library of Congress Name Authority File, ISNI, ORCID, etc.)

Implementing Revenue Management in Your Restaurants: A Case Study with Fairmont Raffles Hotels International

In 2015, Fairmont Raffles Hotels International implemented a system-wide revenue management program in its restaurants. Starting with an analysis of baseline data, Fairmont applied a five-step revenue management process to highlight potential revenue-enhancement opportunities. Restaurant managers and employees were invited to suggest tactics and strategies drawn from three categories: (1) all-purpose strategies, (2) strategies to use when a restaurant is busy (hot), and (3) strategies to use when a restaurant is not busy (cold). Appropriately chosen strategies were simple to implement in most cases, and guests often were pleased with the operational and menu changes. Within a year of implementation, Fairmont restaurants that implemented revenue management had generated five times more revenue growth than those not applying the program

Metadata Guidelines for Digital Resources at Texas A&M University Libraries

These guidelines were written to help TAMU partners create high quality metadata for digital collections deposited in the repository at TAMU Libraries. The goal is to ensure an acceptable level of consistency and completeness of metadata across all collections in the repository in order maximize their potential for discovery for the TAMU community. These guidelines were also written to help Digital Initiatives personnel at TAMU Libraries to map metadata to appropriate fields in Dublin Core and MODS, the two most commonly used schema within the TAMU repository. The guidelines, as they are currently written, address metadata elements that may be recorded for ALL digital collections within the repository, regardless of whether they consist of text, still images, video, or any other type of content. It is likely that specific formats may require additional metadata than what is currently described in this document. More specific guidelines for various formats may be added to this document in the future. It should be noted that this document is a work in progress and will continue to be revised and expanded upon

Core Metadata Elements: Guidelines to Promote Consistency and Access at TAMU

In December of 2017, the Metadata Task Group was formed in response to answer a two part problem. One was to determine the metadata workflow for projects being placed into A&M OAKTrust digital repository. The other was to recommend metadata schema for the DAME, a relatively new concept design to create an inter-operability system involving multiple formats and computer programs. Although much of the focus was on how to handle workflow for digital projects and suggest metadata schema for two specific platforms (D-Space and Fedora), it soon became obvious to the task group that all metadata must be compatible with metadata in other systems within the DAME. Thus, we explored the necessity of consistent metadata and imputing standards in order to provide maximum accessibility to our users, while also trying to be efficient with library resources

Metadata Guidelines for Digital Resources at Texas A&M University Libraries

These guidelines were written to help TAMU partners create high quality metadata for digital collections deposited in the repository at TAMU Libraries. The goal is to ensure an acceptable level of consistency and completeness of metadata across all collections in the repository in order maximize their potential for discovery for the TAMU community. These guidelines were also written to help Digital Initiatives personnel at TAMU Libraries to map metadata to appropriate fields in Dublin Core and MODS, the two most commonly used schema within the TAMU repository. The guidelines, as they are currently written, address metadata elements that may be recorded for ALL digital collections within the repository, regardless of whether they consist of text, still images, video, or any other type of content. It is likely that specific formats may require additional metadata than what is currently described in this document. More specific guidelines for various formats may be added to this document in the future. It should be noted that this document is a work in progress and will continue to be revised and expanded upon

Library of Congress Genre-Form Thesaurus (LCGFT) for Moving Images: Best Practices

The purpose of this document is to provide guidelines, with examples, for the usage of Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) for moving image materials. These guidelines are intended to complement existing official guidelines. As genre/form practice in general is currently being reviewed by several other committees, these guidelines will need to be revisited in the future; however, these best practices fulfill the need for short-term guidance

Report of the DAMENames Ad Hoc Committee

In early 2018, the DAMEid group requested that Cataloging and Metadata unit examine the metadata needs for the DAME. When analyzing metadata needs in both OAKTrust and Fedora, it became clear that the lack of name authority control was causing serious problems for users, especially in the case of a single author having many entries in the author index. For example, Steven M. Wright, Royce E. Wisenbaker, Professor II in Chemical and Electrical Engineering, has 10 different entries for his name. This problem is caused by the lack of authority control and the inconsistent ways in which names are inputted into Vireo and OAKTrust. In their report to the DAMEid committee, the Metadata and Cataloging librarians strongly suggested that some type of name authority control be implemented within the DAME. In smaller repositories with few names and fewer entities (e.g., persons, organizations, subjects, etc.), the absence of explicit disambiguation or authority control can be a manageable problem. When only a few authors share a name, it is easy to tell them apart based on the subject matter of the works attached to the name. The problem compounds as collections grow larger and the number of entities with the same name that need to be distinguished from each other increases. For example, in the large OAKTrust IR, it is hard for a user to identify the "Steven Wright" that he or she is looking for, as there are several authors so named with dozens of items in the IR. Another issue that emerges in a system with no authority control – such as OAKTrust – is that an everyday typographical error (an extra space, no period after an initial, misspellings, etc.) results in a new entry in the author list. This results in multiple names for one person and it means that there is no way for a user to easily identify all the works attributed to one author

Preparing for a Name Disambiguation Application for Institutional Repositories at Texas A&M University: the Planning and Test Preparation Phases

At Texas A&M University Libraries, a cross-departmental task group was formed to examine possible solutions to the lack of authority control in the Libraries’ institutional repositories. It recommended the development of an app that would utilize internal identifiers and existing ones (ORCID, etc.) to disambiguate the names of persons and other entities. Our presentation will focus on the initial work of the task group in planning the app, and the cleanup of a sample of personal names to prepare for the testing of the future prototype of this app. Finally, we will highlight future steps for our project