The "Catholic Portal" is an implementation of a "next-generation library catalog" using MARC records from rare book rooms, etc. -- http://bit.ly/nIF8wl
The Portal is a part of the Catholic Research Resources Alliance. The goal of the Alliance is to bring together rare, uncommon, and infrequently held materials from libraries, archives, etc. in an effort to support scholarly research. It is a VuFind implementation whose metadata comes in a number of flavors: MARC, EAD, and incarnations of Dublin Core. This metadata is first made accessible on the Web by member institutions. I then harvest it, validate it, enhance it (slightly), and stuff the result into VuFind's underlying Solr index. The end result is not really a "catalog" but an interface to an index.
We are slowly working on various enhancements including harvesting and indexing full text, as all as supporting text mining interfaces against full text so the content can be "read" distantly.
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Thu Mar 01 2012 - 08:58:46 EST