DIGITAL LIBRARIES: Enriching the Catalog

摘要

After decades of costly and time-consuming effort, nearly all libraries have completed the retrospective conversion of their card catalogs to elec-tronic form. However, our bibliographic systems still are really not much more than card catalogs on wheels. Enriched content that Amazon.com takes for granted ― such as digitized tables of con-tents, cover art, reviews, summaries, and excerpts ― are still rare in library catalogs. Commercial companies such as Baker & Taylor and Syndetic Solutions offer enriched content for recent materials, but it is usually not available for older books. Thankfully, that is about to change. In January 2004 a group of about 20 ― led by Robert Kieft of Haverford College, Susan Perry of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), and the Mellon Foundation ― met at the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting in San Diego. The group considered what it would take to develop an organizational and technical infrastructure for creating and sharing enriched information about library holdings. They were enthusiastic about the prospects, perhaps because many of them had already been thinking about ― or actively working on ― this problem.