Library 1.1

Antelman, Kristin and Pennell, Charley (2007) Library 1.1.

Abstract

Libraries operate within a culture that posits collaborating towards a common good, through resource sharing, cooperative development of standards, and the building of common work tools. The semantic Web, and the recent rapprochement between RDA and DCMI, have the potential to advance our contribution to the common good in ways that have never been possible before, yet there are still economic, legal, technical and cultural hurdles that are likely to conspire to keep libraries working within institutional silos. This talk will look at how the NCSU Libraries' is trying to work toward a more open catalog platform by creating a web services layer to support features such as RSS and by integrating structured data from outside of the ILS, starting with classification and geographical hierarchies, and potentially extending to chronological hierarchies, FRBR "work-level" records, and academic discipline-related vocabularies. These efforts point to the need for access to additional data that is outside the local machine environment. We look at some of these data sources and assess the obstacles that will have to be overcome before library catalogs, and librarians, will be able to fully join the broader Web 2.0 discovery environment.