Some of the most interesting items identified during the materials selection process were a number of issues of The New Era from 1935 to 1938, collecting the writings of prisoners at the US penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas.
However, the publisher information for this item left some doubt as to whether it was in fact a government publication:
Published by permission of the Bureau of Prisons, Dept. of Justice.
Federal Prison Industries, Inc., Press.
As a result, there was doubt about whether or not the item would be fully accessible to users once uploaded to the HathiTrust (HT).
The HT Automated Bibliographic Rights Determination looks for a specific value in the 008 field of uploaded MARC bibliographic information to determine whether an item is a government publication, and therefore fully accessible.
Items that fail to meet these or other bibliographic rights criteria are available as search-only on the HathiTrust and cannot be viewed in full by users. Uploading search-only content to a trusted digital repository like the HT has great value for long-term preservation, and is of use in text-mining and other research that can make use of copyrighted material, however the goal for this DFW was to contribute content that would be immediately accessible to all users.
To determine whether The New Era MARC record met (or could meet) the criteria for full access, my DFW supervisor and I met with UW Libraries Music/Media Cataloger and Library of Congress MARC Advisory Committee member Cate Gerhart.
After Cate provided us with a brief overview of the MARC 008 field and subfields, we reviewed the MARC record associated with the item in hand.
The item had been cataloged using retrospective conversion of an existing MARC record originally created in 1977 and did not include the needed 008:28 government-publication designation.
Going a step further, we searched available records for other items from the same publisher to determine if a case could be made for changing our record. In fact, many records for items published by Federal Prison Industries, Inc. did include the 008:28 designation. Importantly, such records had been produced at well-known institutions, and many included a designation that they had been produced through the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
Based on this, we added the required designation to the item record, and expect that once it is digitized and uploaded to the HT it will be fully available!