Collection Services

What We Do

Collection Services serves the University of Oregon's faculty, students and staff by providing intellectual, physical, and virtual access to the University of Oregon Libraries' collections in all formats and by ensuring the long-term usability of those collections. It further serves the UO community by coordinating campus efforts to create and maintain an archive of campus scholarly output and by assisting faculty and students with the presentation of or development of content management systems for their own collections of materials.

• We evaluate metadata standards and schemas to determine the most effective means for facilitating resource discovery and retrieval.
• We analyze the content of and describe the Libraries' books, journals, videos, music materials, maps, electronic resources, and digital collections and apply the appropriate descriptions, subject terms and classification to records for the resources.
• We create and maintain the Libraries' online public access catalog by adding and updating MARC bibliographic records and holdings information for the Libraries' collections.
• We share our expertise in metadata and the organization of materials with faculty and other campus groups and assist them in the development of systems for describing and providing access to their collections and research.
• We ensure the quality of the data in the Library's public access catalog, performing authority control, building appropriate user reference structures, and carrying out systematic database clean-up.
• We work with our colleagues in the Libraries and the Orbis Cascade Alliance to create and maintain the underlying system to support the public access catalog.
• We perform retrospective conversion for the Libraries' older materials so that they are also represented in the online catalog.
• We accurately label all physical library materials so they can be shelved and retrieved.
• We evaluate all library materials for appropriate preservation and conservation treatment, performing reformatting, repair, and reinforcement as needed.
• We review preservation standards and techniques, establish local best practices, and coordinate policy setting to ensure the long-term usability of the Libraries' physical and virtual collections.
• We serve on the Libraries' Disaster Response Team, setting policies, developing local best practices, and carrying out clean-up and recovery following disasters.

Members of Collection Services are active in a wide range of professional organizations relating to their specific areas of expertise. In addition, the department participates fully in all four components of the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC), an international organization based at the Library of Congress that is dedicated to the expansion of cooperative cataloging and resource sharing for increased bibliographic control of the world's intellectual content. We also participate in the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), an international effort to develop standards to facilitate cross-community sharing of digital content.

Team Structure

• Materials Processing and Conservation Unit
• Metadata Teams
  • Catalog Management & Enrichment Team
  • East Asian Catalog Team
  • English/Western European Languages Team
  • Music Catalog Team
  • Special Projects Team
  • Serials Team
  • Slavic Team