Recently I learned about OCLC’s beta FictionFinder which is one of the best FRBR inspired implementations I’ve seen. It takes one facet of Google’s page rank to order the initial results of your search – namely the more libraries that hold a Work, the more relevant it must be. Now there are lots of times where FFs model won’t work, especially when doing esoteric research (and yes you can resort on things like date, number of editions, etc. and it does other interesting cool things, but my mind is focused on this particular feature right now). So when do we get Non-FictionFinder? (/me salivates)
I’m trying to sort out some of the impact of different publications about museum cataloging practice. You can look at something and see where it fits into the big picture of the literature at your disposal – but who knows what that meant for curators/registrars/data-bankers, etc. I’d like to say, hey more libraries own this than that, it must have been more important. Except there may be things that were so important they weren’t in the library, they were on my personal reference shelf because I used them all the time. And it’s true that many museum libraries may not participate in OCLC (me thinks…). But its still tempting to think what clues might be there. At least WorldCat is proving a useful to tool for even knowing what’s out there (and cataloged in some unexpected fashion in the UIUC opac and missed in my shelf browsing).
This lead me to wonder whether OCLC tracks the number of libraries who own a work/item over time. Is there some historically relevant research data there? What books persist over time? What are the booms and busts? What does it mean when my collection of Danielle Steel goes from 50 copies to 1 vs. my collection has had 5 copies of Death of a Saleman for the last 15 years. Should that fact be weighted against how many libraries own it?
Lorcan talks about emergent and intentional data, aggregate intentions, and Making data work harder-intentionally.
If we had a similar union catalog of museum records what might it tell us about our collections in aggregate? We don’t have “circulation’ data, but we usually know when and where things have been exhibited. On the market (at least for art) this information has value. Does it translate into value for research? If our collection records are linked to the rights & reproductions database, does it mean something that a particular artwork has been reproduced more than another? Does that make it more relevant for my search?
