[Wactclc-alma] Follow up to this morning's call

[Guidry, Wade]

For those who were on today's call, here's a bit of follow-up on the topic of metadata discovery and linking (related to the ExLibris "Age of Automation" workshop (https://youtu.be/IibQt4IM7nk ).

The federated search platform developed at Oregon State by Terry Reese was called LibraryFind (now defunct).
I did have this platform installed and running for a bit at Coastal Resource Sharing Network, a consortium I worked for in Oregon in the mid-2000's. It was a learning experience, for sure.

Here's a Lorcan Dempsey blog entry from 2006 that talks about federated search, LibraryFind, and the growing challenges of making so much content searchable in an organized, scholarly way (as opposed to "wild west" searching, as in Google or Bing).

http://orweblog.oclc.org/federated-search-that-doesnt-very-well/

Along with the 2007 white paper out of Oxford I mentioned today (https://www.uksg.org/sites/uksg.org/files/uksg_link_resolvers_final_report.pdf ), this blog post outlines pretty well the problem space libraries continue to face when it comes to metadata discovery and linking. And like the white paper, it still reads as  current and relevant. It's just that the problem continues to grow in size, as the amount of data grows.

Here's the Wikipedia page I mentioned this morning that I like and often refer to. It has basic info about link resolvers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenURL ). It's actually under 'OpenURL', rather than link resolver.
Very much worth reading for a basic refresher on OpenURL and link resolvers. (Also a note, I was wrong about SFX being originally developed at a Scandinavian university. It was actually from a school in Belgium.)

As the Wikipedia article notes, OpenURL didn't become an official standard until 2005. So this whole experiment with electronic metadata discovery and OpenURL linking is still really new. (MARC, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MARC_standards , another library technology, became a US standard in 1971.)

In comparison, Toyota has been making Priuses about 8 years longer than OpenURL has existed. And the Millennial Generation (our most recent students) are still from a pre-OpenURL world. We actually won't see OpenURL-native students for another 5 years or so :)

For libraries, at least in collection management, I feel like all of this discovery / linking stuff is going to be the most important topic for the next 20 years. MARC is about 50 years old. OpenURL won't be 50 years old until 2055. We're still very much at the beginning of this shift.


Wade Guidry
Library Consortium Services Manager, WACTCLC
wadeg at bigbend.edu<mailto:wadeg at bigbend.edu>
(509) 760-4474
http://www.wactclc.org



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