Making Books Count in Research Information Management Systems

Research information management (RIM) is a rapidly growing area of investment in US research universities and is the focus of a recent OCLC Research report. RIM systems support a variety of use cases, particularly through their ability to aggregate an institutional bibliography through metadata harvesting at scale from sources like Scopus. While good for STEM journal articles, harvesting is remarkably poor for scholarly monographs and book chapters, requiring manual entry and disproportionately impacting humanities content. Why? This session will answer that question by providing an overview of the academic monograph publishing supply chain, demonstrating how it is riddled with gaps and breaks, where metadata is lost and garbled in unpredictable and nonstandard ways. This has significant implications for RIM systems and beyond. We will conclude this presentation with specific recommendations for title management software providers, publishers, metadata aggregators, and libraries. || Speakers: Jeremy Morse, Jennifer Talley, Rebecca Bryant