Tim,
The idea of local catalogs being exposed to Google spidering has come up
before. Ours is pretty much entirely spiderable, since you can do a
blank search and just start paging, but we intentionally block Google. I
don't think we ever came up very high in a general Google search, but we
swamped the Google search results for ncsu.edu, which was bad news since
our institution uses Google site search for its website search.
Imagine the chaos if every library's holdings were exposed to Google.
It'd be the FRBR problem on a gigantic scale, and the results would not
be localized to the user's context, although Google Local might be able
to help solve this problem. I think the community consensus in the past
(and someone will correct me if I'm out of touch) has been that we
should throw our weight and efforts behind exposing *one copy* (or a few
copies) of the bibliographic information for a resource to Google and
then figuring out how to localize that to a user's geographic context
(aka, individual library). Thus the Open WorldCat project. Which has not
been truly effective at getting library books up into the first page or
two of Google results.
I wonder if Google Book search could serve as our global union catalog
indexed for Google web searching in the future?
-emily
Tim Spalding wrote:
> Does anyone know of examples of a fully-spiderable OPAC?
>
> It's my contention that libraries would do well in Google and even
> Google Local if they were spiderable. I've seen the Lamson Library
> catalog do very well—tops in Google, even without mentioning Plymouth
> State, but it gets a LOT of push from its association with WpOPAC.
>
> But I need some examples. Anyone?
>
> Tim
--
Emily Lynema
Systems Librarian for Digital Projects
Information Technology, NCSU Libraries
919-513-8031
emily_lynema_at_ncsu.edu
Received on Mon Apr 23 2007 - 12:24:43 EDT