Re: OCLC and Michigan State at Impasse Over SkyRiver Cataloging, Resource Sharing Costs

I agree that getting the records out there in some form -- any form! -- would be good and isn't too difficult, though if the Google Book metadata discussions (see http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1701, especially the comments) have shown anything, it's that it's really hard to make sense of sometimes wildly disparate bibliographic data.

The Huffington Post has a neat story on Tim Berners-Lee's "raw data now" project, with a video from the 2010 TED University in 2010: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tedtalks/tim-berners-lee-the-year_b_490726.html. While I'm not sure that putting bibliographic data into the information stream is as meaningful as editing post-earthquake maps of Haiti, sharing data is cool nonetheless.


Danielle Cunniff Plumer, Coordinator
Texas Heritage Online
Texas State Library and Archives Commission
512.463.5852 (phone) / 512.936.2306 (fax)
dplumer_at_tsl.state.tx.us

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU]On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 10:35 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] OCLC and Michigan State at Impasse Over SkyRiver
Cataloging, Resource Sharing Costs


>> In point of fact if all libraries dumped their catalogs to linked
>> data, some xml files, those files could be crawled by various
>> services and in various ways they could link up the data to point
>> someone to the library's holdings...
> 
> The question is how this would actually be accomplished. Most
> libraries don't have this kind of expertise on hand, and even if
> they did, providing this service locally is more expensive than
> most people are willing to admit.



I beg to differ; it is trivial to dump and expose one's bibliographic records to the Web.

Any ILS worth its weight in salt has an export function. To expose one's records the under-the-hood process is the same from ILS to ILS:

  1. find all records
  2. dump as MARC
  3. move the result to an HTTP server
  4. share the URL

The resulting file will be surprisingly small for most libraries. Given the URL, others could get the MARC and do stuff with it. Converting the MARC into XML or some other format is icing on the cake but not necessary. Just getting it out there is a step in the sharing direction.

-- 
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
Hesburgh Libraries, University of Notre Dame

(574) 631-8604