Someone at our library asked recently about getting Google to crawl our catalog. The primary motivation was to reveal some unique items in Special Collections to a wider audience. I find this description of an experiment several years ago:
http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/2003/02/03.html#a3569
Basically, it requires the creation of an XML surrogate of the catalog. What's the status of this idea? Possible? Desirable? Hopelessly labor-intensive? Stupid? Superceded by other approaches? The materials are already in OCLC, so I don't know what a Google crawl of our data would add. Just a chin-scratching morning here today.
Steven R. Harris
Collection Development Librarian
Utah State University
(435) 797-3861
http://collections2point0.wordpress.com/
Received on Wed Apr 09 2008 - 11:45:52 EDT