What’s Next: Cataloging

This week, I am writing a paper about the use of social tagging in library catalog records, and so cataloging and future changes and manifestations in that area are forefront on my mind. As I was going through my “blog topics” tagged items in Evernote this morning, I came across an article about cataloging horizons from ALA’s American Libraries Magazine. Here are some excerpts from that article:

Library catalogs have evolved over time as technology has changed. The last 150 years have seen a progression from book catalogs to cards, and eventually, to online catalogs. Each of these changes has provided new capabilities that can be adopted for improved user services. The next step in this evolution is on the horizon, and it will make possible some new and powerful capabilities for information seekers. Like the hypertextuality of the web, technology is being developed today that can help library catalogs become a rich web of data.

So what does this mean for libraries and library catalogs, who to my knowledge are responsible for the vast majority of metadata available in the world today?

To me, the overarching implication is that libraries can now ill-afford to live with their metadata in a vacuum. The way in which most library metadata (and if you want to know what I mean by metadata, click here) is presented and stored is, for most purposes, unusable by any other web-based standard. Of course, there are metadata standards which are web-friendly (DCMI, XHTML to name a few) but do libraries use them? Nope. We still for the most part use a standard which by today’s standards is a dinosaur, MARC. This format does not play well with other metadata standards, and so is practically unusable. In order to embrace the concepts and practices of the semantic web, libraries must implement metadata standards which conform to the broader standards of the information world. Yes, RDA and FRBR will assist in this, but if the metadata created through RDA is still in a MARC format, we really haven’t gotten anywhere, have we? As a whole, libraries need to move to a more web-friendly format for this idea of linked data and the semantic web in the catalog to really work.

Also, OCLC is going to have to open up the information it holds to the wider world. As you probably know, OCLC is the largest repository of bibliographic data in the world. Through the WorldCat.org interface, you can search 1.5 billion items stored on OCLC’s servers. If we are truly going to embrace this movement called the semantic web, OCLC must be willing to freely share that data.

However, I will talk more about shared, free data tomorrow. For now, I want to say that these are not the only things that libraries must consider in thinking about the semantic web, but only a couple of ideas that seem immediately apparent to me, but no one is talking about. What do you think about the semantic web? Have you seen it impacting your life and how you use information online? Let me know!