Free Books: Loading Brief MARC Records for Open-Access Books in an Academic Library Catalog

Mbooks are open-access, digitized books freely available on the Internet. This article describes the Auraria Library’s experience of loading brief MARC records for Mbooks into its online public access catalog and looks at some of the issues that arose from the record-loading project. Despite the low quality of the records, librarians in Auraria Library thought that loading them into the catalog was advantageous because of the rich content in the collection and because many of the records could be improved using the global update functionality in the catalog. Making the records available through the catalog, as opposed to merely linking to the entire collection from the Library’s Web page, was considered to be valuable because of the aggregation a catalog provides and because the Mbooks collection helped fill gaps in the Library’s physical collections. As more open-access, digitized books become available, libraries will need to plan and manage how best to provide access to them.