On Jan 9, 2008, at 2:03 AM, Heather Christenson wrote:
> Book Discovery in a Mass Digitized Environment
>
> http://tinyurl.com/2hayad
>
> One of the reasons we did this was as a thought experiment - could
> interfaces to our mass digitized collections replace our OPACs?
> Looking
> toward the future, what can we learn from the book discovery landscape
> we see right now?
Very interesting, thank you for sharing, and I think your
investigations beg questions about collection development. What sorts
of content are in these "next generation" library catalog thingees?
To what degree are they inventory lists of things we own or license?
Are there barriers to incorporating things like links to remotely
located digitized books and open access journal articles into these
systems? If so, then what are they?
While I don't think mass digitized collections will replace OPACs, I
do thing the collections can supplement OPACs. For example, the folks
at the University of Michigan have begun making metadata describing
their Google-ized books available via OAI-PMH. A few weeks ago I
harvested 100,000 of these records, indexed it, and created a simple
search interface against it. If it fits into the collection
development policy of a library, it would be entirely possible to add
these metadata records to the OPAC. This is akin to purchasing MARC
records from vendors for microform sets you own.
Lot's of possibilities.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Wed Jan 09 2008 - 08:14:01 EST