Casey Durfee wrote:
>
> Craigslist, Wikipedia and the Internet Archive are good examples of 3
> organizations that deal with gigantic amounts of data and millions
> of users with very limited staff.
Amounts of data and traffic indeed that must be way beyond what
LC's authority server is handling.
So, might not LCSH become an addition to the common Wikipedia itself?
For many information needs today, it is Wikipedia first or second and
libraries a distant third. Just as Google points into WorldCat and from
there into neighborhood OPACs, Wikipedia might redirect users to local
libraries as well, and with LCSH headings as search criteria this
redirection might then be a lot more precise.
The German National Library, some time ago, entered into a cooperation
with the German Wikipedia, which now provides links from biographic
entries to the library's OPAC to help the reader find comprehensive
bibliographic information. Might this not be taken a good few steps
further, to merge the very authority records into Wikipedia itself
and do their management nowhere else but there? The immediacy of this
concept should have some synergistic appeal.
B. Eversberg
Received on Fri May 25 2007 - 00:58:51 EDT