What does EMCO look like after 5 years?
February 6, 2024
The nature of the identity management work in the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) will gradually change from a group of “institutions functioning as the sole creators and revisers of authority records, to PCC serving as leaders, trainers, coordinators and problem solvers for a larger group of participants in this activity.” 1
Membership profile: A much broader group of both engaged individuals and institutions is involved in the day-to-day creation and maintenance of metadata for entities. Those joining EMCO are a combination of those who have never been a part of the PCC before and those contributors coming from existing NACO institutions. The profile of those contributing to entity management work has become noticeably more international.
Greater numbers of identifiers: Quantities of output have at least doubled from the 300K NACO statistics reflected in FY2023.
Policy guidance: The Identity Management Advisory Committee will be serving as the main body to weigh in on policy issues that arise, pertaining to differences of practice across communities that are concerning or the relationship of EMCO activities and the rest of PCC.
Best practices: Policies and practices within a particular metadata community are best handled within that community. Each community determines how best to onboard and train its new members, define the standards by which the work is to be done, and what tools to prioritize, test, and develop.
PCC Standing Committee support: Mappings among schema data elements, e.g. between ISNI XML and MARC21, are something the Standing Committees on Standards and Applications are compiling and tracking.
Next gen support tools: AI plays a number of key roles in entity management work. These include:
- Identifying and tracking entity equivalencies between pairs of registries.
- Quantifying the degree of coverage overlap among them.
- Detecting duplicate entries within a registry.
- Analyzing the entities in bibliographic data and linking them up to registries.
(This last one can apply to legacy metadata, metadata newly received from publishers and vendors, and even to descriptions a professional cataloger is in the process of preparing.)
Conclusion
As far back as its Strategic Directions document of 2010, the PCC stated its willingness to operate in a new outward facing way: “PCC welcomes interaction—both influencing and being influenced by other metadata communities.” 2 The deployment of the EMCO program has made this a concrete reality.
- Program for Cooperative Cataloging. Advisory Committee on Initiatives. “Name Authorities in Transition: Implications for the PCC.” June 24, 2014 (p. 11) https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/PCC-white-paper-ACI.pdf
- Program for Cooperative Cataloging. “Strategic Directions and Action Items, 2010-forward.” (p. 1) https://www.loc.gov/aba/pcc/documents/SDs-Actions-2010-Forward.pdf
Contact the PCC Identity Management Advisory Committee with questions.
