Collaboration Across Borders receives ALCTS Collaboration Award

CHICAGO—The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) has selected Collaboration Across Borders: Opening Access to Holdings of the National Library of Cuba as the recipient of the ALCTS Outstanding Collaboration Citation for 2019.

The Outstanding Collaboration Citation recognizes and encourages collaborative problem-solving efforts in the areas of acquisition, access, management, preservation or archiving of library materials. It recognizes a demonstrated benefit from actions, services or products that improve and benefit providing and managing library collections. The citation will be presented on June 22 at the ALCTS Awards Ceremony during the 2019 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference & Exhibition in Washington, D.C.

Collaboration Across Borders: Opening Access to Holdings of the National Library of Cuba is a collaboration among the University of Florida (UF), the Biblioteca Nacional de Cuba José Martí (BNJM), Cuba’s national library, and OCLC intended to expose the rich resources of the BNJM to scholars around the globe. This collaboration has resulted in the inclusion of over 135,000 records of Cuban materials into WorldCat, with about 99,000 of them unique to BNJM. Working with metadata records provided by the BNJM, OCLC developed processes to add required data, reformat records and ingest them into WorldCat under the symbol BMCJM. For records where MARC data did not exist, University of Florida catalogers created new MARC records for loading and have returned all of the records to BNJM. While ILL of the materials is not currently available, scholars will now know what resources exist at the BNJM prior to research visits. Eventually, digital surrogates will be produced as a part of a larger partnership between the UF and BNJM, Celebrating Cuba! Collaborative Digital Collections of Cuban Patrimony.

The Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) is the national association for information providers who work in collections and technical services, such as acquisitions, cataloging, collection development, preservation and continuing resources in digital and print formats. ALCTS is a division of the American Library Association.