I've come back from AALL all fired up. The session on RDA and the Semantic Web finally got me thinking beyond the bother of a learning a new cataloging standard to the reason for doing so -- which, I think, is to make the data we've got locked up in our library catalogs usable by the rest of the world in ways we have not even considered. The article Accurate Metadata Sells Books by Calvin Reid in Publishers Weekly discusses how important accurate metadata about books and ebooks is to the publishing industry. As David Bigwood, in Catalogablog, points out, some of the metadata comes from nonlibrarians, as in ONIX (Online Information Exchange, an XML-based standardized format for transmitting information electronically) which is used by publishers, distributers, retailers and consumers, and Librarything, whose data is used by Calibre, an open source management tool for e-books. Library data is already enriching these metadata systems -- OCLC metadata is used to enrich ONIX, and Library Thing gets some of its metadata from libraries, too. Already our data and metadata is being used by non-librarians in ways we hadn't really considered. It will be interesting to see how this increases, and in what ways.
From Catalogablog
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