The Jane Hope Libary

The Jane Hope library is located in 40 miles south of Chicago, Illinois. This academic library serves a large university with 23,000 students, 5,000 faculty members, and 7,000 staff members. The Hope library serves a private university; therefore the general public is not included in the patron base. The library consists of 200 staff members, 45 of which are located in the technical services department.

The technical services department includes several divisions listed below:

• Cataloging: 15
• Acquisitions: 10
• Physical Processing: 3
• Digital Initiatives/Electronic Resource Management: 10
• Metadata: 5
• Programmer/Interface Design Specialist: 2

Many staff are cross trained in order to accommodate large projects, both traditional and digital, to utilize individual subject expertise. Our staff members are at least required to hold an undergraduate degree, and our librarians often hold an additional masters degree. Although we have specific job titles separating the catalogers and metadata specialists, the catalogers often work with Dublin Core and MODS.

Technical services staff work in an advanced computing environment. Our department has numerous resources and training opportunities for staff to develop technology skills. Two full time employees provide programming expertise and interface design skills to the department, specifically the digital initiatives unit. The cooperative nature of the unit has resulted in many successful digital library projects.

The main focus of the digital initiatives unit for the last few years has been to digitize our local unique collections that are at risk of becoming unusable. These collections are primarily print documents, but do include audio visual materials. Many of the items are suitable for full MARC records, but the library has decided to provide bibliographic access to this collection through MODS records.

I will be reading two articles to guide implementation of MODS at the Hope Library. Stay tuned for a summary reaction for two articles:

McCallum, Sally H. (2004). "An introduction to the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS)." Library Hi Tech 22(1): 82-88.

Guenther, Rebecca. S. (2004). "Using the Metadata Object Description Schema (MODS) for resource description: guidelines and applications." Library Hi Tech 22(1): 89-98.

These articles should provide needed background information to get the MODS up and running at our library!