Final Observations

The Collection Analysis project enabled the team to gain a thorough understanding of the collection from multiple perspectives. By slicing and dicing the data in different ways, we were able to view the collection from several different angles- to both highlight its strengths and also to showcase some interesting facts. As expected, the collection contains significant holdings on the history of the Catholic Church, Biblical scholarship, and theology, spanning from the dawn of printing to the present, with particular strengths in publications from the 17th and 18th centuries. The top names appearing as subjects in the collection (as demonstrated in Chart 5.5) seem particularly appropriate, for a Jesuit theological library, with Jesus, Ignatius, Mary, and Aquinas all occupying top spots.

The project team thought that this collection analysis was an extremely useful exercise that gave us the opportunity to view the entire Woodstock rare book collection from a holistic perspective. It also gave us the opportunity to drill down into the collections by language, places of publication, dates and century of publication, and the subjects/topics covered in ways we could not visualize before. We were able to see the metadata from the existing collection’s records from new perspectives, as well as learn and extensively use new metadata refining software such as OpenRefine, data visualization tools such as Tableau, and Linked Data from Wikidata for creating maps.

Due to the fact that 2,800 books had only brief records, lacked subjects, and 12,000 did not have LC classifications, Metadata Services staff spent several months over the summer of 2020 enhancing these brief records, adding subject and LC class numbers. This work greatly enhanced our ability to analyze, understand, and visualize the collection. However, the collection analysis results would be even more comprehensive and complete if the items with brief records were fully cataloged. While we do not anticipate that the results of the analysis would be drastically different, additional useful information for researchers could be gained by fully cataloging the materials.

On a practical side, the record enhancement done by the Metadata Services unit will improve discoverability for these rare materials in HoyaSearch. It will also facilitate the Dewey to LC classification conversion project for the Woodstock Theological Library in the future. The rich and highly granular subject term dataset created for this project could be a valuable resource for future digital humanities projects, such as text mining.