Next generation cataloguing?

News for anyone with an interest in metadata rationalisation and interoperability, and which picks on some of the themes discussed at the RIN?s expert seminar on union catalogues a year ago. OCLC, the international library support and research service, has launched a pilot project to explore the possibility of libraries capturing metadata from publishers at an early stage in order to enrich catalogues in a coherent and ? hopefully ? seamless way.  

As reported in the latest issue of Research Information, metadata is an essential tool for cataloguing in libraries, but publishers and libraries use different systems to create metadata. This makes making communication between the two difficult and means that a great deal of duplication can occur. The pilot project, involving up to five major publishers, will seek to investigate the viability and efficiency capturing metadata from publishers and vendors upstream and enhancing that metadata in its online library catalogue WorldCat.

Here, we are told, is how the pilot will work: publisher and vendor pilot partners will provide OCLC with title information i­n ONIX format. OCLC will convert this  data to MARC for addition to WorldCat and, where possible, enrich it in automated ways through data mining and data mapping. Enriched metadata is returned to publishers and vendors in ONIX format for evaluation of OCLC enhancements. Library pilot partners will then evaluate the quality of metadata added to WorldCat through this process and provide feedback on its suitability for use in library technical services workflows.