Just to follow up, Jonathan asked me off-list whether we have active
plans/thoughts about how to get this metadata from scholarly databases
run by third party companies, and here's how I responded to him:
This is going to have to be a negotiation process with these third party
companies, and some companies are going to be more receptive to this
than others, just as some of these companies have been willing to make
MARC records available for their content in the past, and some have not.
The rationale to use with the content vendors is that making metadata
about their content more available through library discovery
applications is going to increase interest in their products, and that
this is better technology than metasearch because it doesn't impose
limits on the number of resources retrieved from their database (such
as, perhaps, the first 20 in a metasearch query). We need to also
reassure vendors that we are building technology that will address their
requirements, such as limiting access to the content itself to paid
subscribers.
Obviously, this is going to take some effort to get a significant number
of content providers on board. Libraries that use XC and that subscribe
to this content are probably in the best position to make a case for
access to the metadata at the point when they are negotiating contracts
- we can't really do it for them. We see this as one activity that
could be coordinated by the not-for-profit organization that we are
forming to support users of the XC software.
Jennifer
-----Original Message-----
From: Bowen, Jennifer
Sent: Wednesday, June 17, 2009 10:10 AM
To: 'Jonathan Rochkind'; Next generation catalogs for libraries
Subject: RE: [NGC4LIB] Preliminary report on user research for
eXtensible Catalog
XC's architecture is based upon aggregating metadata, and we are
building a robust platform that will perform this aggregation, called
the XC Metadata Services Toolkit (MST). This open source software will
support metadata from scholarly databases as well as from library
catalogs and repositories. We believe that this is a much more
promising direction for future discovery interfaces than relying upon
metasearch technology, although the two approaches may need to be used
alongside each other in the shorter term. We just don't see a promising
future in continuing to develop new software that uses metasearch
technology.
Jennifer
-----Original Message-----
From: Jonathan Rochkind [mailto:rochkind_at_jhu.edu]
Sent: Tuesday, June 16, 2009 10:21 AM
To: Next generation catalogs for libraries; Bowen, Jennifer
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Preliminary report on user research for
eXtensible Catalog
One of the things that stuck out to me in the report was user's
confusion about whether they could find articles in the catalog, as well
as user's unhappiness with having to learn new interfaces for additional
scholarly databases.
Are you considering trying to address the scholarly database issue with
some kind of federated broadcast search, aggregated index, or other
means of attempting to integrate scholarly article results in the main
interface?
Jonathan
Montibello, Joseph P. wrote:
> Jennifer,
>
> Thanks so much for sharing this useful and very interesting report
with the community. We talk so much about how we need to know what the
users need. As you say in the report, this is not a comprehensive,
end-all be-all type of report, but it answers a few questions and
prompts even more.
>
> Cheers!
> Joe Montibello
> Class of 1945 Library
> Phillips Exeter Academy
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Date: Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:08:48 -0400
> From: Jennifer Bowen <jbowen_at_LIBRARY.ROCHESTER.EDU>
> Subject: Preliminary report on user research for eXtensible Catalog
>
> (Posted on behalf of Nancy Fried Foster,
nfoster_at_library.rochester.edu)
>
> The eXtensible Catalog project at the University of Rochester's River
Campus
> Libraries is pleased to release the first report on the user research
that
> we conducted in support of XC software development. We thank the
Andrew W.
> Mellon Foundation and our user research partners - Cornell, Ohio
State, Yale
> and the University of Rochester - for their generous support of this
project.
>
> Use this URL - http://hdl.handle.net/1802/6873 - for a report that
> summarizes the objectives, methods, and major software design findings
from
> the data collected in the user research portion of the eXtensible
Catalog
> (XC) project. A full analysis and interpretation of the data is not
included
> in the present report and will be provided at the conclusion of the
project.
> This report includes edited results from the brainstorming sessions
and a
> list of the features that emerged from the analysis of those results.
(See
> the eXtensible Catalog website at www.eXtensibleCatalog.org for more
> information about the overall
> project.)
>
>
Received on Wed Jun 17 2009 - 11:11:15 EDT