Discovery, access, and preservation — one of the three programmatic areas of the Libraries’ 2014-2019 strategic plan — are impossible in the absence of good, consistent, well-managed metadata. Historically, a library’s catalog housed mostly title-level metadata for books and journals. With the advent of Google and other Web-scale discovery tools, however, users expect to find much more than books and journals when they search the Libraries’ collections: they want articles, presentations, images, audio, video, and more—anything, in fact, related to the topic of their research.

To this end, the Bibload Working Group and Digital Access Team have joined forces to enhance discovery and access by acquiring, transforming, and loading metadata into The CAT for materials previously unfindable via either The CAT or LionSearch.

The most recent example of this forward-thinking collaboration is the NASA Technical Reports collection, considered a “critical component in the worldwide activity of scientific and technical aerospace research and development.” Metadata for items in the NASA Scientific and Technical Information (STI) Program is harvested using OAI-PMH, transformed into MARC records using an XSLT transformation created by Ken Robinson of the Digital Access Team, and loaded into The CAT. To date, over 20,000 records have been loaded, with the total expected to reach 400,000 within a few months. To see the records, search “NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS) Collection” in The CAT.

Submitted by Jeff Edmunds on behalf of the Bibload Working Group and the Digital Access Team