I think the original poster's email also raises some questions about what a library catalog is for. To my mind, it's meant to be an inventory of what a particular library holds. The holding is the crucial element, and the extensive bibliographic data serves a discovery purpose. I think the web enables libraries to let go of the discovery aspect: users find out if they want to read a particular book (article, DVD, manuscript, whatever) from sources other than the catalog, and the catalog exists to tell them if their library has it. What I think linked data can enable for libraries is to move away from extensive description of our resources (once that has been done by someone else, perhaps in a centralized linked data store, ahem LoC/OCLC), and to focus on linking our holding, our unique copy, to other discovery sources and other descriptions of the resources. I think it can enable an even more efficient version of copy cataloging.

Because let's be honest: If I'm looking for information, I'm going to look on the web, not on the library website. And once I've found the thing I want to read, all I need to know is how I can get it. I imagine that using linked data to link our holdings to other representations of a work on the open web could get the information users really care about--whether we have the thing they want--into the search engine representation of the thing.

I also think this would enable us to spend more of our resources describing and providing access to our unique collections, which is another whole ball of wax, with different uses for and types of linked data creation.

Laura Krier


		Laura Krier about.me/laurakrier

On Thu, May 22, 2014 at 4:38 AM, Arslan Farooq <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

Hi

I can not speak for Bibframe, but publishing catalogs as Linked Data is not the primary purpose of Bibframe, this has started much earlier. "Linked Data" is coined as a term for an "easy path" towards Tim Berners-Lee's vision of a Semantic Web that can be understood as an improved version of the World Wide Web of today (a giant global graph with database features)

Just thought I point out that it may help OP to read this.

[ The Linked Data community in all its diversity draws inspiration from the thoughts of the Web's inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. In his article, "Giant Global Graph" 1 he expressed the basic evolution of the idea with a few apt observations:

The realization [behind creation of the Internet] was, "It isn't the cables, it is the computers which are interesting". The Net was designed to allow the computers to be seen without having to see the cables. The [World Wide Web] increases the power we have as users again. The realization was "It isn't the computers, but the documents which are interesting". Now you could browse around a sea of documents without having to worry about which computer they were stored on. Now, people are making another mental move. There is realization now, "It's not the documents, it is the things they are about which are important". ]

-- Arslan