Emily's comments on their experience are interesting, and she raises
some good points in general. I also understand that another impetus for
OpenWorldCat is that Google simply declined to index the entirety of
world cat holdings pages (I forget how many? tens of millions?). It was
too many for them, they didn't want them. I believe they currently index
the X most popular (that is, most widely held) bibs as provided by world
cat, but for the remainder, that's why there is openworldcat.
Jonathan
Emily Lynema wrote:
> 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
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Mon Apr 23 2007 - 12:50:49 EDT