2025/02/17 by Boutsaba Janetvilay · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · #Digital Humanities and Scholarship
paper · pdf · doi:10.21428/1bfadeb6.8afac647
openalex publication_date 2025/02/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
Electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are often overlooked as open-access resources. This study focuses primarily on a consortium of the California State University (CSU) ScholarWorks <https://scholarworks.calstate.edu/> Institutional Repository. It will also provide valuable insight into the importance of bridging the gap between information from small, local communities to the global knowledgebase to generate improved retrieval results for the knowledge seeker.The work of a catalog librarian comprises several national and international standards and procedures. These standards provide guidelines and a code of conduct during our metadata description process. As such, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) have been behind in keeping up with the social changes, including new terms and names relevant to local communities. While cataloging the most valuable open-access resources of local communities, locating precise terms of the LCSH as a subject analysis process was challenging. Locating the most appropriate terms that could help describe the unique local populations and lived experiences in the LCSH was nearly impossible. Many terms describing the precise local history and its people in the Central Valley of California are often left out in the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Through a research study, a list of new terms and names was created and will be forwarded to the Library of Congress. The goal is to bridge the gap between small local communities and nationwide/global knowledgebase to freely access a wealth of knowledge featuring local history.