Abstract:
Libraries world-over are facing an economic crisis due to the
imbalance in skyrocketing of subscription prices and shrinking or at
best stable library budgets. Librarians have long ago realized the fact
that however rich their collections are, they will not be able to meet the
ever growing demands of their clientele. And, for this very reason, the
inter library loan (ILL) service was started by the librarians so that it
could, to some extent, supplement their collections. However, for the
ILL service to be effective, the participating libraries in the ILL service
should have their online public access catalogues (OPACs) in place.
Also, having a union catalogue (a centralized database) of the
participating libraries will make the service more efficient. Past
experiences in creating and maintaining union catalogues clearly reveal
that maintaining the currency of the union catalogues is not an easy
task, especially, if the processes of obtaining the updates of the OPACs
from the member libraries and updating the union catalogue involve
manual procedures. In this paper, we propose an OAI-based approach to
build and maintain union catalogues. In this approach the individual
OPACs (data providers) expose their metadata for harvesting. The OAIbased
service providers harvest the exposed metadata automatically.
The metadata thus harvested is ingested into a centralized database,
which will serve as an online union catalogue, supporting search,
browse, and other value-added functionalities for the end-users. The
OAI-based approach will eliminate the manual work involved in getting
the OAPC updates and aslo in updating the union catalogues.
