Swimming with the Fiches: Reviving the International Aerospace Abstracts Collection to Make It Discoverable and Accessible to Researchers

Abstract

When the authors discovered a forgotten microfiche collection, they knew they needed to determine a process to make the information discoverable and accessible to researchers. Using a combination of manual data entry, cross-checking against printed indexes, and batch conversion of data using MarcEdit, they devised processes and workflows for creating reasonably good metadata for this large collection and for loading the MARC records into their local integrated library system. Their methods can serve as a model for any collection for which basic metadata would be useful in enhancing discovery and access.