In response to Carolyn McDonald, Conal Tuohy wrote
"A catalogue from which Google is able to harvest rich metadata, I'd
argue, must sport an OAI-PMH interface. If more catalogues had such an
interface, just to connect to Google, it would be a big step forward for
other, internal,
purposes too.
If a user goes into your library, searches for a book using Google, and
gets a hit which directs them to your library catalogue, that, to me, is a
big win. The user may just think "oh my dog! the library has a catalogue
of its own! who knew?"
I can say without doubt that this is exactly what happens - but it is not
limited to users inside your own library.
(Before I got around to posting this, Carolyn had covered at least part of
the ground already, at least as far as NLA, PictureAustralia, &
LibrariesAustralia. Most of my following comments simply relate our
experiences of increased attempts to access our resources once you
provide access from outside your own domain. - with a postscript about
getting the desired item/resource once you identify where it is)
The State Library of Victoria uses OAI-PMH to provide metadata for its
image resources to PictureAustralia, and also to OAIster. From OAIster,
the data goes to Yahoo & Google. For a period during 2005, there was a
glitch in the harvesting of the metadata from OAIster by Yahoo.
No only did the hits on our resources (as shown via our WebTrends stats)
drop significantly, so did the searches of our Pictures Catalogue - there
is a link back to the Catalogue from the image display page. When the
ability to find our resources via Yahoo was restored, the searches on our
Pictures catalgoue returned to the earlier level. And when the Google
access was added, the statistics of both took another upward spike. I
only wish I had the time to do some really rigorous statistical analysis.
Other supporting data comes from analysing the log of our Z39.50 server
for our main catalogue. As Carolyn mentioned, thanks to the National
Library of Australia, the records for resources in our National
Bibliographic Database - LibrariesAustralia - which match those in Google
Scholar, are now findable via Google Scholar. That is, it is possible to
look for a title in Google Scholar, see a link to LibrariesAustralia, and
go via that to the record in an individual library. (What you do once
there is a different topic for discussion.)
In June 2005 there were about 5000+ sessions initialised on our Z39.50
server, from about 40 different sites, most of them identifiably
Australian.
When I did this check in the middle of June 2006, there had already been
more than 7000 hits, from about 150 sites - including the USA, UK, Canada,
Finland, Italy and Zimbabwe. I don't think they all suddenly found the
State Library of Victoria as a desirable catalogue to search directly. I
am reasonably sure they found us because they searched Google Scholar and
followed the LibrariesAustralia link. I have not yet had time to look at
the total searches for June 2006 & see if there was an overall increase.
That is a task for next Monday.
Now to go back to the implications of this for the patron who is NOT a
'local' and has no idea what some of the abbreviations (particularly for
locations) mean on the screen displaying the bibliographic record. It
seems to me that looking at what can be done with the user interface needs
to go well beyond the local searching/finding, to encompass information on
how to get, and that really needs to assume that the seeker is NOT onsite.
It is not enough to have a great, easy to use search interface, if the
way from there to the real thing is so difficult to navigate that the
finding becomes an exercise in frustration.
Anne Beaumont, Senior Research & Development Coordinator,
The Office of eStrategy & Innovation
State Library of Victoria
328 Swanston St, Melbourne 3000
Voice: +61 3 8664 7100 Mobile: 0419 109 285
Mailto: ABeaumont_at_slv.vic.gov.au
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Any opinions expressed are my own and not those of my employer
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Received on Fri Jun 30 2006 - 06:54:36 EDT