Page 165 - Building Digital Libraries
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CHAPTER 6


                                                   leverage markup syntax to enable search engines to reach into, and index,
                                                   the data in WorldCat.org. More interesting to libraries, however, is that
                                                   this data can be mined using XPath and Sax, since this marked-up data is
                                                   also embedded within the results page as XHTML. This makes WorldCat
                                                   .org a powerful linking service, since the results page can now be utilized
                                                   to retrieve URIs to a Works page, to VIAF information about the author, as
                                                   well as to a whole host of other information about the record. OCLC has
                                                   been out in front of the library community in demonstrating how semantic
                                                   data can be made manifest within library catalogs and websites today, with
                                                   minimal effort.


                                                   Moving Forward
                                                   So, what can you do today? Libraries are sitting on a precipice. On the one
                                                   hand, our community understands the work that needs to be done, and
                                                   in many cases, we have systems that support the ability to begin moving
                                                   library data into semantically aware systems. At the same time, we have
                                                   mountains of legacy data that need to be reconciled, and currently we lack
                                                   the widespread library infrastructure to enable large-production reconcili-
                                                   ation projects. It’s a tough place to be. How do we start?
                                                          Begin encoding your data now. Libraries and metadata special-
                                                              ists must stop thinking about their metadata as a collection
                                                              of strings, and must start encoding their data. For a time, this
                                                              will be slow going while library infrastructure develops, but
                                                              we cannot have a future in which libraries utilize linked data
                                                              and linked-data concepts at scale until our metadata shifts
                                                              from a series of strings to encoded objects.
                                                          Use systems that support heterogenous data profiles. While
                                                              MARC may remain the lingua franca for our traditional li-
                                                              brary catalogs, the community has an opportunity to move
                                                              beyond this and expand our bibliographic data model within
                                                              the digital repository space. Libraries should be adopting
                                                              systems that allow them to support and utilize a wide range of
                                                              data schemas. Developing models, like the Portland Common
                                                              Data Model, embrace this approach, and as library systems
                                                              continue to develop, this type of heterogeneous data modeling
                                                              should become more of the rule—as libraries are able to use
                                                              existing ontologies from a wide range of communities to not
                                                              only enable better description and discovery, but to provide
                                                              more actionable data that supports self-description.



                                                   Summary

                                                   Sadly, this chapter can only cover a small number of the metadata frame-
                                                   works that are currently available to digital library designers. As such, this
                                                   chapter focused on the three metadata frameworks that currently are most
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