On Oct 21, 2010, at 7:41 PM, B.G. Sloan wrote:
> "In what appears to be an expansion of its Direct Request for Articles project, OCLC announced the launch of its WorldCat knowledge base, through which it will be providing one-click access to open-access full-text ebooks and articles in WorldCat Local search results." -- http://bit.ly/crDHMT
From the article:
The WorldCat knowledge base includes material from large
open-access journal sources, such as the Directory of Open Access
Journals, PubMed Central, and BioOne, as well as freely available
content from the HathiTrust digital repository and the Internet
Archive. Notably, open-access material from licensed platforms,
such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, and Nature Publishing Group
will be accessible.
This is exactly the sort of thing I've been advocating for quite a while. Based on the content of one's existing catalog (and therefore one's local collection development policy), crawl and harvest content from the Web, mirror it locally, update the local catalog to point to the locally harvested content, index it, and provide services against the result. Such a process addresses many of the traditional library activities (collection, preservation, organization, and dissemination) and manifests them in the current digital milieu. The library profession does not need (nor require) a for-profit company (or any other third party) to do this for us.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Fri Oct 22 2010 - 08:10:05 EDT