2021 Reports

Hacking the Catalog as an Open Access Research Tool

Hogan, Kristen (KA); Davis, Jeehyun

Part of the life cycle of scholarly communications is discovery, and one type of material often obscured by the federated results of library search interfaces is open access materials not hosted in the institutional repository but living on the open web. Selecting and cataloging such open access resources builds a focused collection of open access materials that appear in the same search results as materials that libraries lease, purchase, and host. Bringing open access materials into catalog results makes them easier to discover, use, and cite. Identifying and cataloging open access resources emphasizes the vital roles of collection development and cataloging in curating collections of open access resources for research. As with proprietary collection building, a commitment to create catalog records for the open access scholarship created by your faculty, students, and staff improves the discoverability of these resources and can bring your institutional affiliates into new scholarly citation networks. This process also offers an opportunity for modeling critical cataloging. Using local headings and affirming keywords and vocabulary to build a full catalog record improves the catalog’s affirmation of people of historically marginalized identities and asserts the critical value of ethical naming as a scholarly communications practice to support distribution and future authorship. We share here the steps for creating or a conversation for affirming and continuing this practice at your institution.