BCcampus Award for Excellence in Open Education: Linda Woodcock

Linda has been instrumental in enhancing the findability of B.C. open textbooks in library catalogues. In 2016 she spearheaded the creation and maintenance of MARC records for the B.C. Open Textbook Collection. We’re proud to announce Linda Woodcock as this month’s recipient of the Award for Excellence in Open Education.

Nominated by Cleire Lauron, Research, Instruction, and Cataloguing Librarian, Thompson Rivers University

Linda stands in a library. A sign next to her says "I can help you with your research. Just ask me!"

Working closely with Cleire Lauron since 2017, Linda has been responsible for creating Machine-Readable Cataloguing (MARC) records for the titles in the B.C. Open Textbook Collection. MARC standards are a set of digital formats for the description of items such as books catalogued by libraries. These records are contributed to WorldCat.org and are also made available for libraries to download on the British Columbia Electronic Library Network (BCELN) website. MARC records for BCcampus open textbooks were first shared informally, notably by Sarah Ogden, library technician at Vancouver Island University, who created records using the AACR2 Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules, 2nd edition content standard. Sarah continued to contribute records after Linda joined the project.

A discussion by the British Columbia Library Association (BCLA) Cataloguing and Technical Services interest group led to a formalization of the process. A standard record was agreed on, and the group planned to make the records available in a similar manner to the Legislative Library of British Columbia MARC record sets. At this point Linda became involved, taking the lead on creating a standardized set of MARC records for BCcampus open textbooks in both AACR2 and the Resource Description and Access standard and arranging to have them posted on the BCELN resource-sharing website. Linda’s role is to review the contributed records, amalgamate them into the record sets while ensuring consistency in the application of the content standard and coding practices, then submit them for mounting at BCELN. She also responds to questions from users about the record sets.

Linda was the technical services and serials librarian at Kwantlen Polytechnic University from 2007 until April 2022. Prior to that, she was head of the Cataloguing division at Vancouver Public Library. Cataloguing is a highly cooperative endeavour that involves library professionals from around the world creating resource descriptions and developing and maintaining a wide variety of internationals standards. As a strong supporter of this cooperative, Linda served as the coordinator of the NACO Canada Funnel Project, a mechanism for contributing to an international name-authority database. She was also the Canadian representative on the Collections and Technical Services Advisory Committee of the OCLC and a member at large of the Canadian Committee on Cataloguing.

During her career Linda has spoken about cataloguing and metadata issues at conferences of the BCLA, the Canadian Library Association, the American Library Association, and the Online Audiovisual Cataloguers. In addition she has mentored and trained cataloguers in resource description, subject analysis, classification, and name-authorities management.

Notable quote:

“I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with Linda for the past five years in regards to the maintenance of the B.C. Open Textbook Collection MARC records. She’s both a pleasure to work with and highly skilled in cataloguing. We’ve been very fortunate to have her talents available to us for the past six years.”
– Lauri Aesoph, manager, Open Education Operations, BCcampus