By David DormanAmerican Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
By David Dorman
American Libraries Columnist
ddorma@ltnet.ltls.org
Library consultant for the Lincoln Trail Libraries System in Champaign, Illinois.
Column for November 2000
Libraries planning digital library services, or even just wondering what they might look like in a few years, would do well to be aware of a working paper that OCLC CEO Jay Jordan sent to the OCLC Users Council. Titled “Extending the OCLC Cooperative: A Three-Year Study,” the paper outlines an ambitious plan to expand and enhance WorldCat:
“Rather than one single large catalog housed in Dublin, Ohio, Extended WorldCat will be a globally distributed resource consisting of data, metadata, multimedia, and links. . . . The core metadata description will be linked to other information such as reviews, tables of contents, images, digital objects, and availability information.
“Extended WorldCat will offer information storage, indexing, searching, access, and delivery. . . . While [it] will continue to rely on traditional library standards such as AACR2, MARC, and Z39.50, it also will take advantage of emerging standards in the information community, such as RDF, XML, Dublin Core, OpenURL, and the Open Archives initiative.”
The OCLC Board of Trustees and Users Council will discuss the paper this fall; later in the year a follow-up paper will be distributed to OCLC members and their comments will be solicited. While OCLC’s general plans for evolving its WorldCat database have yet to be fleshed out, this preliminary statement of purpose indicates that we should see some major strategic initiatives coming from the firm in the coming year.
For the “what’s here now” folks, we can report that OCLC has already started to evolve WorldCat. The CORC database—consisting of MARC/AACR2 and Dublin Core bibliographic records describing electronic resources, which are created by libraries participating in CORC—is now being synchronized with WorldCat. This means that WorldCat has now gone beyond being exclusively MARC/AACR-based.
This was inevitable, of course. We librarians either have to move beyond MARC or face the prospect of separating metadata for print resources from metadata for electronic resources. (No, Virginia, MARC is not dying: He’s just getting some siblings who will someday be as big and smart as he is.) In its announcement of the CORC service, OCLC referred to the concept of Extended WorldCat described above and indicated that the CORC service will be the engine that evolves WorldCat. As a hint of changes to come, OCLC has also made it possible through the FirstSearch interface to limit WorldCat searches to electronic resources.
Ex Libris has been selected as the “vendor apparent” for MnLINK’s System X. System X will be replacing MnSCU/PALS (Minnesota State Colleges and Universities /Project for Automated Library Services), a home-grown library management system that serves as a union catalog for over 120 academic, public, school, and special libraries in Minnesota and North Dakota, which is managed by the Higher Education Services Office (HESO) in St. Paul, Minnesota. One of the largest library systems in the world, it will grow even larger when System X replaces it, because the University of Minnesota will be migrating to System X from its current Geac system.
Back in 1997 a request for proposals was issued for a system to replace MnSCU/PALS, and DRA was the vendor chosen. Negotiations with DRA were suspended in November 1999, and a new RFP was issued in February 2000. This time around, the evaluation focused more on proof of existing functionality and less on vendor representations. The selection of Ex Libris by MnLINK’s Vendor Evaluation Team will now trigger contract negotiations between Ex Libris and HESO.
For more about MnLINK and its System X selection process, go to www.mnlink.org. For more about the Aleph 500 system from Ex Libris, go to www.exlibris-usa.com.
In what we can only hope will be a trend-setting development, the Public Library of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, North Carolina (PLCMC), has developed a user-customizable “Personal Library and Web Companion” called brarydog. The service is designed especially for the library’s student patrons, but can be used by anyone with a PLCMC library card. Here is proof that libraries can complete with personalized portals such as My Yahoo!
Behind the scenes, brarydog uses active server pages (a Microsoft server-based technology that uses JavaScript, VBscript, or PerlscriptFor to create dynamic and browser-independent Web pages, and which is optimized for multiple users) to access a database platform that stores each user’s personal information. For a look at what brarydog is all about, visit brarydog.net.