I have been following the discussion about the One Big Database with interest. In Australia, the National Library is in the process of building a Big Database which will encompass:
* the national union catalogue
* full text indexing of our national web archive
* our national collection of digitised historic newspapers
* metadata for digitised pictures held by libraries, museums,archives
* metadata harvested from Australia's university repositories, and other repositories
* all of the other metadata that we can get our hands on: collection descriptions (eg EAD), oral history transcripts, any journal article metadata that is created by partners or that we can convince vendors to give us, etc., etc.
Although the NLA has recently transformed its catalogue using VuFind, in the longer term it may well evolve its catalogue into a "view" of this One Big Database. And it is possible, again in the longer term, that other Australian libraries might choose to evolve their catalogues on the same basis.
There is some background about this project at
https://wiki.nla.gov.au/display/LABS/2.+Single+Business+Discovery+Project
Warwick Cathro
National Library of Australia
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of William Denton
Sent: Saturday, 14 February 2009 4:40 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Personal perspectives on catalog use
On 13 February 2009, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> It's possible to have a conceptual One Big Database, while still having
> individual actual catalogs that contain a subset of the records from
> that One Big Database.
>
> Our individual catalogs should be automatically, without user
> intervention, sending and getting changes to records out to 'the cloud'.
> We can still have our own library catalog, but the records in it are
> conceptually just one subset of a shared cooperative corpus.
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> The big, centralized library will not be able to tailor its holdings and
> services to its local users.
I entirely agree, and I'd put it as I think I've put it here before: We
should help people build, manage, and share their personal branches of the
One Big Library. That's the future of useful, well-managed cataloguing.
I gave a talk about this a couple of weeks ago (getting into pattern
languages, too) with Stacy Allison-Cassin and the slides and audio are
here:
http://hdl.handle.net/10315/2501
Pardon the self-promotion. We explain our idea of the One Big Library
(hello, dchud!), and Stacy talks about a metadata commons that would help
it.
I was talking about some of this cataloguing stuff with Jodi Schneider.
Today we were wondering how much of the cataloguing problems that can't be
solved by machines could be broken down to simple tasks and handed over to
the Mechanical Turk.
I'm starting to think an Internet-scale open bibliographic metadata
commons (with complete FRBRization) is coming soon, and if we're not the
ones who make it, the rest of the Semantic Web people will make it for us
with the parts we've made available so far, and lots of librarians will
sit in their basement cubicles wondering why no-one else listens when they
tell each other how important their work is.
Bill
--
William Denton, Toronto : www.miskatonic.org www.frbr.org www.openfrbr.org
Received on Sat Feb 14 2009 - 19:03:25 EST