Eric wrote:
> Creating an index to all the things a library owns, licenses, or is
> apropos to the specific information needs of a library's clientele
... is clearly the best way to make library content accessible. I fully
agree to your posting. I tried to say about the same in 140 chars this
morning: http://twitter.com/tillk/status/2236241709 :-)
Summon isn't a ready solution for all of this, I think. At the moment it
is "just" a searchable index (though really huge and searchable through
up to date search technology). To make good use of it, add an usable
user interface (though the one provided by Serial Solutions isn't bad
either), and add your library services (loan, ILL, access to electronic
content) and you have a fine digital library...
Of course, when you have that good user interface and a good integration
of your services, you may even start aggregating the data yourself
(which is the least funniest part of this). But I think, it doesn't
scale well, if every library starts harvesting data out of openly
available as well as commercial sources. Data aggregation is something
that can be done cooperatively quite well, because a lot of work goes
into data conversion/normalization and you really don't need to do that
redundantly at many places. And there are already established solutions
for cooperative data aggregation, see cooperative cataloging (of course
those infrastructures need to be taken to the next level...).
Regards,
Till
--
Till Kinstler
Verbundzentrale des Gemeinsamen Bibliotheksverbundes (VZG)
Platz der Göttinger Sieben 1, D 37073 Göttingen
kinstler@gbv.de, +49 (0) 551 39-13431, http://www.gbv.de
Received on Fri Jun 19 2009 - 13:01:08 EDT