On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:02:32 -0400, Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_ND.EDU> wrote:
>I'm not sure what the best solution is, but I would
>consider dumping our MARC records from our catalogs, transforming them
>into some implementation of RDF, converting the values in the 1xx
>fields, 6xx fields, 7xx fields, and 254 fields to the URIs from places
>such as dbpedia.org or OCLC's authorities, and then let the Web do the
>rest.
Absolutely correct. I don't think anybody knows what the best solution is
right now. Being a cataloger, I would say that the links should go to our
resources, e.g. the LC Authority File or ideally, to http://id.loc.gov.
Neither of these tools are helpful for a user however, since these are all
dead-ends and there are no links to resources.
But there are other alternatives. Here is an example of how Bernhard
Eversberg and I have cooperated. His site has links out into the world, and
are much more useful to people. I have in turn utilized his excellent work
in my own catalog. For example, if someone sees this book in my catalog:
http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=20883
They will see the little blue "s" next to each 650 field. When you click
this, you will search only the subfield 650a in Bernhard's system, and when
you find something interesting, e.g. click on "Popes Art patronage" in my
catalog, you will see "Popes" in his system. You can click on "Popes" and
see broader term "Catholic Church -- Bishops" Click on that and he has
nicely added links back into my catalog. Once in my catalog, you can see
what we have and people can then utilize the "Extend Search" function. Also,
in Bernhard's system, people can search Google, Librarything, OpenLibrary, etc.
My users find this *very useful.*
I'm sure everybody can imagine how this can be improved a lot. For example,
I am thinking about linking into the VIAF for names now, but I'm still
experimenting. Not that it is difficult to implement, but it needs to be
intelligible and useful for the patron, especially the remote patron. In
this case, my users could get the Italian form of name, which they need, but
it is still highly complex and there are some parts that need to be
implemented.
In any event, the first step is to share and begin to work together.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Wed Oct 28 2009 - 05:02:50 EDT