a) To convert 50,000 records in western and vernacular languages. A mix of publications from and about Asia and Africa in the humanities and social sciences. This is a continuation of the work funded under the Non-formula Funding (NFF) of Specialised Research Collections in the Humanities Initiative Programme. The records and the collections are integrated in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) collections and so it has not been feasible to tackle this project in conjunction with other partners.
b) To improve access to and use of the collections by a wide range of external users. It is clear that the existence of machine readable records from the earlier retroconversion project, available over the web, has increased the use which has been made of the collections. In making these records available, benefit the academic and research community.
The SOAS Library is a national research collection in Asian and African studies. The School has taught and researched widely in the social science disciplines since the Hayter Report (1961) and continues in this tradition. The significance of the collections to the national scene is recognised by the volume of use they attract from researchers nationwide. In addition, the Library acts as a back-up library to the British Library for the loan of material in the languages Asia. It also lends widely from its other collections of material about Asia and Africa to the UK Higher Education community.
The project will facilitate the exploration of this research material by researchers and enable them to plan research visits to London more efficiently. It will facilitate the inter-library lending of material which is eligible for such use. It will reveal the wealth of resources that are held on closed access, such as microform and pamphlet literature. It will enable greater work on collaboration with other Libraries collecting in the same subject fields.
1) The 50,000 records have been batched and sent to OCLC for retroconversion by matching or transcribing of the original record.
2) The records have now been returned and unpacked.
3) The records are being sorted by department and language for systematic checking.
4) The records are now in the process of being checked. An existing member of staff has been seconded to the project but we plan to employ an additional member of staff to assist with this work. Work on the records for vernacular material will be supported by the language specialists on the staff..
5) Staff sickness has delayed the project somewhat from the original programme but it will be completed within the timescale for RSLP funding.
It was decided to use the services of OCLC as this had been the method used for the previous project and it proved to be a cost effective method for material acquired between 1978 and 1989. The cataloguing standards and transliteration standards employed ensure that the likelihood of achieving a good match are high. The major amendment which has to be made to items which are not matched is the addition of current Library of Congress Subject Headings. The records all contain an entry for the former local subject heading which in most cases will assist with the process of assigning current headings.
The material will be mounted in the Library’s machine readable catalogue [which has been created to and will be maintained to the standards for RSLP projects].
The catalogue is accessible as a web-based catalogue http://lib.soas.ac.uk/.
This project forms part of a larger strategy to complete the retrospective conversion of the whole of the Library’s catalogue.
Further information about the Library and its collections can be found on its website
http://www.soas.ac.uk/Library/
E-mail: hc@soas.ac.uk
Content: Gill Davenport
Last updated 3 July 2002