Content Enhancement: Carolina Planning Journal

Recently, the UNC Libraries staff completed an enhancement project for the Carolina Planning Journal collection.  The Carolina Planning Journal is published by the Department of City and Regional Planning and “contains issues of the oldest student-run planning journal in the United States. Articles are written by academics and practitioners in the field of urban planning and cover a wide range of public planning topics. Additionally, the journal features book reviews, reports on current planning projects, and a list of recent departmental Master’s theses and PhD dissertations. Though early volumes were printed semi-annually, starting in 2008 issues were published annually.”
Before the enhancement project, issues of the Carolina Planning Journal were uploaded to the CDR as a single PDF file, along with minimal descriptive information.  All of the articles published in the issue were listed in the issue’s description field.  Due to this format, it was difficult for users to find a specific article within the journal by searching within the CDR.  If users located the issue that the article was published in, they needed to download and look through the full issue to find their article.  Also, it was not possible to provide robust descriptive information about each article, including author information.

In order to address the discovery issues detailed above, the staff decided to create separate PDFs and records for each article and link the article records back to the full issue record.  Amy Bowman, the Repository Content Technician, broke out 771 articles for all 71 issues of the Carolina Planning Journal currently deposited in the CDR.  She also located and created descriptive information for each article and added it to the CDR record.  Each article now has its own record and is searchable within the CDR.  Additionally, the articles can now be harvested by search engines and made available to a wider audience. The full issue PDF is still available for visitors who wish to look through the entire issue at once.

We’re excited to review and enhance our collections to make them easier to find and experience!