OSI and Bibliographic Access: opening a conversation

1. OSI and Bibliographic Access: opening a conversation Caroline Arms Kevin Novak Michelle Rago

2. OSI: A quick perspective from the trenches • Where we fit in OSI organization • What guides what projects and tasks OSI staff work on • Selected activities that may be relevant to your Reflections from outside the OSI Web Services group • Some questions (from my perspective) • And on to the main event

3. OSI Organization • http://www.loc.staff/osi/about/org.html • Where the three of us fit in

4. What/who guides what we do • LC Digital Strategic Plan (March 2003) • Priorities established by and requests from • Digital Executive Oversight Group (DEOG) • Heads of service units • Librarian • Infrastructure activities identified by OSI as supporting several priority projects or planning for projects relating to managing and sustaining digital content • Digital Strategy and Initiatives Web site • http://www.loc.gov/staff/deog/deog-home.html

5. National & International Policies, Legal Mandates, Standards & Best Practices LC Policies, Legal Mandates, Standards & Best Practices The Digital Life Cycle Framework LIFE CYCLE PROCESSES PLAN Produce Get Select Prepare/ Assemble Describe Sustain Make Available

6. Other selected activities related to bibliographic access • Liaison for Digital Conversion Group to Bibliographic Access • Mapping American Memory non-MARC records to MODS • OAI (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) • Records for items in selected American Memory and PPOC collections harvestable -- steadily adding more • As low-cost way of sharing records and allowing incorporation of content in other services (e.g. RLG’s Cultural Materials) • New DLF activity on best practices for OAI • New, coordinated look at collecting and providing access to serials

7. Questions to reflect on (from my perspective) • Which to focus on first? • Better experience for users who come to LC’s Web site, making it easier to find relevant content and services • Better interface to LC’s catalog • Powerful possibilities not implemented in Voyager but potentially supported by relationships in records • Unified search, for users in reading rooms, to LC’s catalog and bibliographic resources to which LC subscribes • likely to sacrifice the power of current OPAC search

8. More questions • By exploiting catalog records, could new channels bring new users to LC • Already happening • Open WorldCat (Google, Yahoo, OCLC) • RedLightGreen • Yahoo harvesting OAI records • What else is worth pursuing • P&P and G&M content accessible through Google images?? • Can less costly cataloging practices be used for some content without sacrificing service to users • Less time on aspects that don’t benefit users • Getting and transforming records from other sources • MODS for lightweight description

9. And a couple more • To what extent would enhancement of records enhance service as perceived by users? What is cost-effective? • Upgrading old records • Adding to records to enhance service for certain audiences • Adjusting practices to make records more useful in other contexts • What new services can LC build based on authority records (an unexploited treasure) • For LC users • To support metadata generation outside library community • Including by communities from whom we might want to get metadata • As part of the semantic web.

10. One last reminder and on to the main event • If the Reflections exercise leads to any projects that become priorities for Library Services and for which OSI resources are requested, OSI stands ready to contribute and add to its portfolio. • Meanwhile, the OSI Web Services group clearly has experience and expertise that could be relevant and objectives that overlap with yours.