« Blyberg shares innovation | Main | Panlibus Magazine - issue 5 »
24 January 2007
Are union catalogues cool again?
Posted by Paul Miller at January 24, 2007 03:20 PM
I ask only partly in jest, but it is interesting, in these times of Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Microsoft's Windows Live Academic Search and their ilk that various UK and Dutch stakeholders are coming together in London next week to discuss the scope and potential for a UK union catalogue or catalogues.
The meeting is being organised by the Research Information Network, and attendees include representatives from the various stakeholders in existing catalogues that serve some needs of some parts of the UK population, some of the time. We've been here before, of course, including work at the turn of the century on a Feasibility Study for a National Union Catalogue [PDF]. The UK also has some well-established services such as M25, COPAC, CAIRNS and others, all serving their particular groups of users.
I'm going along to talk about some of the ways in which the Talis Platform can help here, both making the jobs of those running existing services easier, and also facilitating new services to new audiences. As you'll be aware, data shared with the Platform from UK-based contributors already makes it the largest single source of information on the contents of UK libraries; it's as close as we currently get to a non-partisan national union catalogue, and the apis and licensing mean that it's there for use in building all sorts of new applications.
Along with others who are facilitating sessions on the day, I've prepared a short position statement which has been circulated to attendees. Although written primarily for a UK-based and university-interested audience, the paper may be of interest to other readers of this blog, and it's available for download [PDF].
In following up on the event, and continuing to demonstrate the potential of the Talis Platform, we'll be organising a webinar during February; watch this space for more information on that.
Today's picture is again from Flickr, and again Creative Commons-licensed. It's 'Rings', by Lisa Batty. Rings, as in union, as in marriage. Geddit?
Technorati Tags: Audience, Education, Free Our Data, JISC, Libraries, meeting, MLA, OCLC, open data, Participation, Cenote, RLN, SOA, Standards, Talis, Talis Community Licence, Talis Community License, Talis Platform, TDN, Trust, web services, WorldCat
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.talis.com/mt/mt-tb.r280.cgi/672
