Abstract

"ZombieList to Track Historic Business Sources: A Collaborative Crowd-sourced Project"

jennifer boettcher, Georgetown University (boettcher@georgetown.edu)

Powered by crowdsourcing, the ZombieList tracks the status and format of core business titles’ content, as well as whether the source is alive or reincarnated or gone. We build the ZombieList to support historical research. What were the key contemporaneous sources in business for historical context? How far back do title of the source go? Does this content still exist in another format or different name? Who owns the rights? What should we preserve? There are about 20,000 titles that have to be reviewed from core business bibliographies used in the education of business librarian since 1949.
The ZombieList team is harvesting the titles listed in the core business bibliographies and tracks them to their earliest editions, through changes in names, publishers, and formats, then confirms their status as of 2020.
The presentation will include the background and status of the ZombieList. It will also reveal the challenges and opportunities of assembling a team, introducing conference participants to different organizational tools like Zotero, Google Sheets, WordPress, Listservs, and library catalogs, as well as to techniques for training and motivating a team.
An important goal and outcome of ZombieList project is to encourage librarians, researchers, archivists, and historians cultivating a culture of awareness when managing heritage collections of business sources by knowing the titles, identifying where preservation copies of those titles reside, and working with monographs and other formats. It all starts with capturing the core business titles and revealing their status using the ZombieList.
To learn more about the ZombieList go to https://boettcher.georgetown.domains/HisBusColl/