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

Eric, you forgot the last step:

  5. The data immediately becomes out-of-date, and increasingly stale with each passing day.

Doing a one-time dump of MARC data is easy, to be sure.  

But creating an automated service that exposes your records in such a way that "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" is a more complex challenge.  

Especially for libraries with ILS systems that are not particularly worth their weight in salt.

--Dave

==================
David Walker
Library Web Services Manager
California State University
http://xerxes.calstate.edu
________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Eric Lease Morgan [emorgan_at_ND.EDU]
Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2010 8:34 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