Library Catalogues as Data: Research, Practice and Usage

by Paul Gooding (Editor), Melissa Terras (Editor), Sarah Ames (Editor)

Overview

Through the web of library catalogs, library management systems and myriad digital resources, libraries have become repositories not only for physical and digital information resources but also for enormous amounts of data about the interactions between these resources and their users. Bringing together leading practitioners and academic voices, this book aims to consider library catalogue data as a research resource.

Separated into four sections, the book discusses a range of topics surrounding library information and data, including:

• practical routes to preparing library catalogue data for researchers;
• the ethics of library metadata privacy and reuse;
• data interoperability across library systems;
• data and collections bias;
• library-vendor relationships and data licensing;
• the practical and theoretical issues inherent in reimagining administrative, usage, and bibliographic data as a research resource; and
• scholarship that responds to the possibilities of library data.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783306589
Publisher:	American Library Association
Publication date:	10/17/2025
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Dr. Paul Gooding is a Senior Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. A trained librarian with a background in Media Librarianship, his research explores the theoretical and practical impact of large-scale digitization in the cultural heritage sector. Gooding currently serves on the Digital Preservation Coalition's Workforce Development Sub-Committee, and the Academic Advisory Board for the British Library Heritage Made Digital Newspaper Digitisation programme. He previously founded and directed the UEA Digital Humanities incubator, and has a track record of leading funded research projects with major research and national libraries in the UK and US.

Prof. Melissa Terras is the Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Edinburgh's College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, leading digital aspects of CAHSS research as Director of the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society, and is Director of Research in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Gooding and Terras have collaborated on a previous edited volume, entitled Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future.

Dr. Sarah Ames is Digital Scholarship Librarian at the National Library of Scotland, with responsibility for the Library's Digital Scholarship Service and Data Foundry. She is a member of the LIBER DH Working Group core group, where she co-chairs the Research Collaborations group, RLUK Digital Scholarship Network, and the Alan Turing Institute Humanities and Data Science group. Sarah has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh; her PhD thesis was shortlisted for the Saltire Literary Awards 2013. Alongside this, she has postgraduate qualifications in Library and Information Science and in Data Science.

Table of Contents

Foreword - Thomas Padilla

Introduction: The Library Catalogue Data Ecosystem - Paul Gooding, Melissa Terras and Sarah Ames

Chapter 1: Making the Conceptual Concrete: Defining, Describing and Visualising Collective Collections - Brian Lavoie

Chapter 2: Effects of Open Science and the Digital Transformation on the Bibliographical Data Landscape - Péter Király, Tomasz Umerle, Vojtěch Malínek, Elzbieta Herden, Beata Koper, Giovanni Colavizza, Rindert Jagersma, Leo Lahti, David Lindemann, Jakub Maciej Łubocki, Alexandra Milanova, Róbert Péter, Nanette Rißler-Pipka, Dorota Siwecka, Matteo Romanello, Marcin Roszkowski, Mikko Tolonen and Ondřej Vimr

Chapter 3: Data Quality in Library Catalogues and its Impact on Access, Analysis, and Reuse - Gustavo Candela

Chapter 4: Data Bias and the Natural Language Processing of Metadata - Lucy Havens

Chapter 5: 'Contains Scenes of Mild Peril': Illuminating the Catalogues of Dark Archives - Martin Paul Eve

Chapter 6: Book Formats, Printing Practices and Reading Habits in Early Modern Europe - Mikko Tolonen

Chapter 7: '(S)hut not thy Heart, nor thy Library': Realising the Potential of Historical Library Borrowing Data - Katie Halsey and Matthew Sangster, with Brian Aitken, Karen Baston, Maxine Branagh-Miscampbell, Alex Deans, Jaqueline Kennard, Gerard McKeever and Joshua J. Smith

Chapter 8: ChatGPT for Bibliometrics: Potential Applications and Limitations - Daniel Torres-Salinas, Mike Thelwall and Wenceslao Arroyo-Machado

Chapter 9: Using Generative AI to Turn 19th Century Library Catalogues into Data: Applications and Limitations -Julia Bauder and Christopher Jones

Chapter 10: A Corpus Linguistic Analysis of Catalogue Data: Understanding Curatorial Practice Over Time - Rossitza Atanassova and James Baker