[Web4lib] google & library catalogs

[David J. Fiander]

K.G. Schneider wrote:

> It seems almost insane, and certainly archaic, that in 2006 every library
> has copies of a record for a book. I agree with Lars' statement--"Maybe it's
> OpenWorldCat, maybe not"--but also with his statement that "The solution for
> the future cannot be that every library catalogs (= keeps inventory of) the
> books in their collection," insofar as he is referring to a local copy of a
> centralized record. 

I've been thinking about this a bit recently.  The ILS serves two purposes: 
inventory control for the staff, and search engine for the public.  It's 
not hard to argue that in the former role, it's pretty bad.  NCSU's started 
to move in the right direction: take the bibliographic data out of the 
catalogue and dump it into a specialized search engine.  The search engine 
then links back to the "inventory control module" to check for local holdings.

This is is sounding better and better.  Our inventory control system 
contains management information about our collection, and an OAI-PMH 
harvester (or some other crawling protocol) gathers holdings information 
into a central database.  If _everybody_ did this, it would make my life as 
a library patron much simpler, since I regularly use one academic and two 
public libraries, and only my academic library is in WorldCat, so I end up 
making the same search three times in some cases.

Of course, search result presentation becomes paramount, but then, that's 
what we've been talking about.