Comments on: Promoting access to the best literature of the past http://everybodyslibraries.com/2009/10/26/promoting-access-to-the-best-literature-of-the-past/ Libraries for everyone, by everyone, shared with everyone, about everything Mon, 20 May 2013 15:27:22 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: John Mark Ockerbloom http://everybodyslibraries.com/2009/10/26/promoting-access-to-the-best-literature-of-the-past/#comment-1917 Thu, 29 Oct 2009 19:42:41 +0000 http://everybodyslibraries.com/?p=952#comment-1917 Chris, thanks for your comment. I think there’s always going to be a multiplicity of places where people look for and share stuff. What I would like to see is that good curation and recommendation services be included in all sites that are used to look for resources, especially those sites that get a lot of use and/or a wide audience.

Exactly how to make this best work will require some more sparks of genius, as you imply. But I think a good start is for existing communities to accommodate this, and for those communities to share their information freely and easily. They should also import such information when it makes sense to do so. We need to do more “local” cataloguing that pulls from and contributes to a wide commons, and less local cataloguing that stays local.

I have been thinking about this in terms of my own catalogue, as well. I already export my data in a couple of XML formats, which anyone is free to take and build on under a CC license, and I may broaden these offerings in the future. And I’ve been considering ways to import more outside information once I have the infrastructure better set up for handling it.

In the meantime, for scholars, readers, and librarians already working regularly with a particular community’s catalogue or corpus; your contributions can help the other members of the community that also use it; and if your community opens up to work with others, it can potentially help a much larger audience as well.

]]> By: Chris Rusbridge http://everybodyslibraries.com/2009/10/26/promoting-access-to-the-best-literature-of-the-past/#comment-1914 Wed, 28 Oct 2009 08:19:52 +0000 http://everybodyslibraries.com/?p=952#comment-1914 John, this looks like an excellent suggestion as far as it goes. You note (by subtle implication) the shortcomings of breaking the online citation-sharing services (like Connotea, CiteULike and Zotero) into “social islands”. The same problem, as far as I can see, might well apply in even worse form to your idea of sharing information on good editions through local catalogue activities. It’s not naturally social and it’s even more fragmented. Librarians might do something through some derivative of Worldcat, but perhaps not scholars. Maybe it needs some spark of genius we haven’t seen yet?

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