One of the attractive things about the internship I’m doing was getting the opportunity to work with a tool specifically designed to facilitate the collection and, to a certain extent, curation of metadata. It seems like that’s increasingly what catalogers are being asked to do when we’re asked/expected to take metadata in a wide variety of formats with widely varying levels of completeness into catalogs or other local databases for discovery and/or resource management purposes. Unfortunately, most of our systems were designed with a vastly differnt paradigm in mind. Certainly, ILS systems are designed to ingest bibliographic records in MARC format created elsewhere, but they operate on the principle that a person is going to sit there and manually compare a physical object, such as a book, to each individual bibliographic record and make adjustments manually to suit local needs.

The system I’m working with during my internship is designed specifically to collect data from multiple sources and combine it into a highly sophisticated database where that data can be analyzed, manipulated and output in very flexible ways. It is also specifically intended to allow people with little to no knowledge of databases or programming to do pretty sophisticated stuff without having to learn much about programming. Though the system is still in a fairly early stage of development, I can see that it has real potential. Over the next couple of months, I’m going to experiment with building some library-oriented applications on this platform to test its relevance to solving the challenges that librarians face with regard to data curation.

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