The Mansfield Library subscribes to the Readex database U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994 (full-text historic reports of Congress and federal agencies). Given the option of purchasing MARC records for all 262,000 publications in the Serial Set or making use of free access to simple Dublin Core records provided by Readex, the library opted to repurpose the free metadata. The process that the Mansfield Library used to obtain the Dublin Core records is described, including the procedures for crosswalking the metadata to MARC and batch loading the bibliographic records complete with holdings information to the local catalog. This report shows that we successfully achieved our goals of dramatically increasing access to Serial Set material by exposing metadata in the local catalog and discusses the challenges we faced along the way. We hope that others tasked with the manipulation of metadata will be able to use what we learned from this project.

How to use Excel to generate metadata for any encoded filename or identifier for any digital object whose attributes can be expressed in an abbreviated form.