Enhancing Catalog Records of Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) with ORCID Identifiers: A Case Study at the University of Tennessee Libraries

Abstract

Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange is The University of Tennessee’s (UTK) open-access archive for research and creative work by UTK scholars and researchers; including electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) (University of Tennessee Libraries, 2023a). UTK began to offer the submission of theses and dissertations in electronic format online as open-access content in the academic year 2002-2003 (University of Tennessee, 2002, p. 20). Catalogers at the University of Tennessee (UT) Libraries have been cataloging ETDs in Ex Libris Alma local catalog and OCLC WorldCat database. Between December 2019 to June 2020, UT Libraries participated in the PCC URIs in MARC Pilot (LC PCC, 2019, October 24). In this pilot, four catalogers and one practicum student added ETD authors’ and their advisors’ ORCID iDs (ORCID, 2023) to the catalog and name authority records following the pilot’s guideline and later adopted this practice into the current workflow. For the pilot, the participants added 371 ETD catalog records to OCLC WorldCat database and the Libraries’ Ex Libris Alma catalog. During the pilot we observed that a small percentage of ETD authors’ and major professors’ ORCID iDs do not display their information to the public. The article concludes with the impact of ORCID iDs in the global linked data platforms such as WorldCat Entities and Wikidata and its potential for further data analyses on scholarly communication in Scholia, a tool to create scholarly profiles based on Wikidata.