Member Forum: Transforming publisher-supplied metadata to improve digital legal deposit workflows at Library and Archives Canada

The digital legal deposit unit at LAC acquires digital publications in several ways, including web form submissions, SFTP deliveries of ONIX metadata and e-books, harvested ETD-MS metadata and theses/dissertations from institutional repositories, and automated transfers of MARC metadata and publications from government departments. We have developed customized metadata transformations for each of these ingest streams. We enrich the publisher-supplied metadata to create standardized MODS records for all of the publications in our Preservica repository. The MODS records then undergo an additional transformation into MARC format before we load them to our library catalogue. The goal is to leverage publisher-supplied metadata to automate (as much as possible) the creation of library catalogue records for digital publications while maintaining acceptable standards of metadata quality. Transforming the various types of metadata that we receive into library catalogue records has been an interesting challenge. Arlene will share LAC’s experiences and lessons learned.