In a move that will enhance the functionality of discovery services available through its partners and competitors alike, EBSCO Information Services last month announced a new policy on metadata sharing that will make all metadata for 129 of its full-text databases, more than 550,000 ebooks and more than 70 historical digital archives available to third-party discovery services. The policy also outlines a commitment to provide assistance with linking technology that has been requested by customers. Previously, the company had required third-party discovery services, such as OCLC’s WorldCat or Ex Libris’s Primo Discovery and Delivery, to use an EBSCO Discovery Service (EDS) API in order to search EBSCO content.
Separated At Birth: Library and Publisher Metadata
The Douglas County Libraries’ (DCL) pioneering project to own, rather than license, much of its e-content has not only forged a new business model but also exposed a new frontier in metadata. As of March, about 22,000 of the library’s nearly 58,000 e-content titles had been purchased directly from publishers and stored on an Adobe Content Server (ACS), and it became quickly apparent to library staff that we were going to have to get creative with the metadata associated with this material.
With New Funding, DPLA Sets Sights on Search
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) awarded $1 million to fund the creation of the infrastructure for the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) last week, and the organization will now turn its focus toward developing a way to search across the many disparate collections involved with the project.
Google Refine: Metadata Power Tool
I’ve long said that as librarians we should be able to say “I’ve never metadata I didn’t like.” (ba-dump). In other words, we should be excellent at acquiring, massaging, translating, merging, deduping, and all the other types of activities that might be required to make metadata really useful. But to do those things well require […]