On 24 April 2007, K.G. Schneider wrote:
> I wonder how many of us are conceptually on board with the concept of a
> national catalog, and yet hesitate to endorse this concept (or even
> argue for a functional model we realize is not working for us now, if it
> ever did) because the only functional model remotely available to us
> (and not that remote any more, either) would place us under the control
> of the Big O.
National catalogues mean lots of catalogues! There are lots of nations.
I met Thom Hickey, Chief Scientist at OCLC, a couple of years, and have
never forgotten that he said he'd take the WorldCat database home on his
iPod. WorldCat's grown a lot since then, but so has iPod storage.
So disk space isn't a problem, but running something as big as WorldCat
does require a lot of resources. On the other hand, it seems to be mostly
a matter of implementation. What a large union catalogue does is mostly a
solved problem.
Is it the sort of problem where someone outside, like a Google or an
Internet Archive, would look at the requirements and say, "That's not that
much, actually--we have the disk space and bandwidth, and it's not much
work to build some basic tools and APIs"?
Maybe someone will treat building a freely available global union
catalogue as a corollary to their main business.
Bill
--
William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org www.openfrbr.org
Received on Tue Apr 24 2007 - 19:31:58 EDT