Eric Lease Morgan,
> 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.
This is tremendous. If we can just get more libraries to involve themselves in these types of efforts, it will be a new world!
I didn't look at their records very closely, but I didn't notice any subjects. Still, there were the OCLC numbers and LCCNs so things could link together very nicely.
It all seems to be so close!
James Weinheimer
Received on Wed Jan 09 2008 - 10:44:59 EST