Overview
The Library’s digital bookplating program creates digital bookplates, manages the assignment of endowed and cash funds to materials acquired, places a link to a digital bookplate in catalog records, and displays the most recently acquired titles (and a link to a catalog search for all associated titles) on a dynamic web page devoted to each fund. Digital bookplates showcase donor generosity, encourage giving, and provide ongoing stewardship.
Team
- Nancy Jakubowski, Library Associate Specialist
- Patricia Putney, Financial Officer
- Jean Rainwater, Head, Integrated Technology Services
Technical Details
The digital bookplate site is a MySQL/PHP application which imports and displays data from our Innovative Interfaces catalog. The database includes information about the donor, the bookplate, fund restrictions, reporting information, and income. A web interface allows staff to enter and edit data, upload bookplate images, and produce reports.
We associate books with endowed funds and their bookplates AFTER they are cataloged, making use of exported records and macros to add the bookplate fields. Item records have three new fields:
- field group “y” MARC 856: creates the link to the appropriate bookplate page
- field group “f” (fund): this field is indexed as a number search, and allows
linking from the appropriate bookplate page - field group “a” (accession information): a human-readable note that identifies the
endowment and fiscal year
For endowed funds, titles and record numbers are imported once each year to the MySQL database, and we display the five most recently cataloged titles associated with the fund on the donor’s bookplate page. A query of this table creates the rss feed of sample entries on the bookplate homepage.
This project has been extended to cash gifts and gifts in kind. The intention is to replace all paper bookplating. As is the case for endowed funds, up to five titles associated with the bookplate appear on the bookplate page, but rather than enter title and record number for these titles in the MySQL database, we now screen-scrape from a catalog search on the bookplate from a URL of this pattern: http://josiah.brown.edu/search/m?SEARCH=bookplateStoddardHarris.
- Annual Stewardship Process & Timeline
- Digital Bookplates – Josiah fields
- Imported Order Information in the Item Record
- Technical Services Digital Bookplate Processing
Project Links
- Digital Bookplates website
- Digital Bookplates administrative interface [login required — screenshots available]
- Link to an item with a digital bookplate
Reports and Presentations
- Presentation at the Innovative Users Group meeting in April 2008.
- The digital bookplate team received a Brown University Excellence Award for Innovation in 2007.