Alexander Johannesen wrote:
>
> For any linked data to become of importance, you must first solve the
> puzzle of identity management. But yes, if you did this, the library
> would live on forever.
>
What better way, regarding the size of the calamity, than to start with
what we have? There's the LCSH authority file, and there's VIAF.
And the LC names and strings can, as they do now, serve as a first
approximation to identifiers. Better of course, add the Id numbers to as
many catalog data as possible.
In LCSH, there are about 220.000 identifiers for work titles, and over
5 million for persons. And VIAF has links between persons and works.
Here's where you can browse in the titles:
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/lcsh/page.php?urG=TTL&urS=alice
The link from there into WorldCat seems to work more often than not.
These title authorities, however, are based on expressions, not works
really, but the main title given in the record supposedly is always
the original title. There is no usable linking from related titles
to the originals! The future policy and requirements for dealing with
these need to be discussed anyway.
This, however, can only be a first step. Users will need more, they will
need a robust and simple data format with which to communicate in easy
and straightforward manners. And this is what we don't have. It needs to
be something that would be readily understood by all sorts of
third-party software. One might think of the formats used by some common
personal bibliography software like Endnote. Those formats we could
easily produce out of MARC. The format itself is not the whole story, it
needs to be embedded into protocols that are easy to implement. It
doesn't seem like vendors would develop any of this by themselves! Nor
have Google or Amazon come up with any appropriate model. We will have
to provide the specs - who else? Or have you seen any specs for
bibliographic data, developed by non-librarians, that are not in some
ways inadequate or horrifying?
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri Nov 06 2009 - 08:12:56 EST