Quoting Ross Singer <rossfsinger_at_GMAIL.COM>:
>
> I guess my point was more that I'd rather see more and more of this
> abstracted away from our legacy ILSes and OPACs and think about this
> sort of functionality as part of the design of the discovery
> interface.
Absolutely.
I've had this idea for a while that the "authority" record should
become a real "person" record -- something along the lines of WorldCat
Identities or the author pages in the Open Library
(http://upstream.openlibrary.org/authors/OL22022A/Barbara_Cartland).
Or perhaps even like the entry in wikipedia. Included would be a list
of or link to all of the books (etc) by the author, which also would
make it easier to disambiguate persons with similar names. And if
there were a good source for this data, then library catalogs could
choose from among the available fields which ones they want to
include. To me, this would be an encouragement for catalog software
developers to include some new features, while not breaking current
catalogs.
Essential to this, and something that I don't think wikipedia does
quite as well as it should, would be providing source information for
individual data elements. You may want to select name variants from US
libraries, but not from non-US; or you may prefer the publisher's
author bio over wikipedia's.
kc
>
> That is, how stuff is stored in the ILS doesn't have to reflect how
> it's stored and used in the public interface.
>>
>> BTW, the VuFind example is quite nice. For all that some folks consider
>> wikipedia to be complete anarchy, their opening descriptive paragraphs seem
>> to work well in a lot of different contexts.
>>
> Indeed! I wish they'd take this further (VuFind doesn't do much to
> break out of a MARC mindset, really) and actually model some of this,
> but it's definitely a start.
>
> For my Code4lib presentation in February, I modified a "stock" VuFind
> instance slightly, adding a bit of RDFa to the views, to show how it's
> relatively simple to contribute to the linked library data cloud just
> by using the stuff we already know:
>
> So take:
> http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Author/Home?author=Serra%2C%20Richard%2C%201939-
>
> which translates into:
>
> http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http%3A//dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Author/Home%3Fauthor%3DSerra%252C%2520Richard%252C%25201939-
>
> or
>
> http://dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Record/5316261
>
> which translates to:
> http://www.w3.org/2007/08/pyRdfa/extract?uri=http%3A//dilettantes.code4lib.org/vufind/Record/5316261
>
> It's crude, but a start.
>
> -Ross.
>>
>> --
>> Karen Coyle
>> kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
>> ph: 1-510-540-7596
>> m: 1-510-435-8234
>> skype: kcoylenet
>>
>
--
Karen Coyle
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://kcoyle.net
ph: 1-510-540-7596
m: 1-510-435-8234
skype: kcoylenet
Received on Wed Apr 28 2010 - 12:23:42 EDT