Global Coverage

I have been following the NGC4LIB email discussion list for a few months
with great interest and get the odd itch to contribute but I am a relative
newbie. The contributions to this discussion list appear to be predominantly
from US-based authors and there is the occasional posting from the UK,
Australia, Canada and a few other countries but not many. I assume that the
readership is more geographically diverse though. Some stats from the
subscription list might be useful? I sent a REVIEW command to the listserv
to get a list of email addresses to analyse by country domain but haven't
had a reply yet.

So here is a musing related to union catalogues (national and international
in particular) and the impact of OCLC's activities.

As an IT Manager who has worked at both the National Library of Australia
and the Library and Archives Canada, I have been discussing with librarians
what the future role of a national union catalogue could be.

The fact that locations data in Worldcat has thus far not been global in
coverage has maintained the business case for retaining national union
catalogue operations in many countries. [Does anyone have an old breakdown
on the volume of holdings records in Worldcat by country?]

In many cases these national catalogues have been extended to

   - include more non-published material (online and physical) by
   aggregating collection 'catalogues' from other types of collecting
   institutions
   - include more article and item level entries
   - provide easier ways for users to "get" resources
   - include additional search targets (eg OCLC, other union catalogues)

It appears that OCLC has been proactive recently in establishing agreements
with national libraries that will allow them to add these national-level
aggregations to the uber-aggregation that is Worldcat - so that the
adjective 'world' is not so misleading.

Here are two examples described and I'm sure there are more - perhaps there
is a list somewhere?

http://tepuna.natlib.govt.nz/*new*s/connect/FAQ_*OCLC*_*OCLC*
_Initiative_10_may_2007.DOC
http://www.nla.gov.au/librariesaustralia/questions.html#oclc

I am curious to know in how many of these cases there is a two-way exchange
of descriptive and location (bib and holding) records and whether the
national institution is free to expose their national collection for
harvesting
by other mash-up services under this arrangement (either specialised subsets
or other uber-aggregators), regardless of the route by which the records
were obtained.

OCLC is doing a great job in raising the visibility of library resources in
the Web 2.0 environment - building the aggregation of supply to match the
aggregation of demand occurring because of Google,  Yahoo, Amazon and
Wikipedia. Talis are doing the same in the UK context but I am not aware of
what is happening in the rest of Europe or in Africa, Asia, and South
America.

I believe that new models of lending will soon follow to match, options that
will break down geographic barriers further. Someone living in the UK will
discover a piece of the long tail at a New Zealand location and perhaps be
able to obtain it more easily from there than finding the time to get
transport to the nearest library that is willing and able to do an ILL loan
request on their behalf from another library in the UK.

However, if it is only OCLC that has the whole aggregation in its database,
how can we provide find and get services for niche purposes that rely on
different indexing and ranking mechanisms than used by Worldcat and yet be
global in reach. Can we still expose our national collections to other
aggregators to reach a different audience under these agreements eg through
a European library search service, or a Chinese language library search that
includes holding records from every library with a Chinese language
collection ?

Monica
---------------------
monica.berko_at_gmail.com
(currently on interchange at Library and Archives Canada)
Director, Collections Infrastructure
IT Division
National Library of Australia