MyLibrary

As stated previously, MyLibrary implementations are made of a number of components: 1) librarians, 2) users, 3) information resources, and 4) facets & terms creating relationships between the first three things. This posting introduces the “beef” of MyLibrary — the information resources.

Librarians love to create lists. Lists of books. Lists of journals. Lists of Internet resources. These lists represent information resources in a MyLibrary implementation. For better or for worse, MyLibrary uses Dublin Core metadata elements (plus a few others) to characterize content. This means each item can have titles, creators, descriptions, subjects, etc. Here is a more exact mapping of MyLibrary resource methods to Dublin Core elements:

1. contributor –> MyLibrary::Resource->contributor
2. coverage –> MyLibrary::Resource->coverage
3. creator –> MyLibrary::Resource->creator
4. date –> MyLibrary::Resource->date
5. description –> MyLibrary::Resource->note
6. format –> MyLibrary::Resource->format
7. identifier –> MyLibrary::Resource::Location
8. language –> MyLibrary::Resource->language
9. publisher –> MyLibrary::Resource->publisher
10. relation –> MyLibrary::Resource->relation
11. rights –> MyLibrary::Resource->rights
12. source –> MyLibrary::Resource->source
13. subject –> MyLibrary::Resource->subject
14. title –> MyLibrary::Resource->name
15. type –> MyLibrary::Resource->type

While the use of Dublin Core might not be the ideal terminology to describe all of a library’s information resources, it can be quite useful in quite a number of cases. One of the “kewlest” is the use of OAI. All OAI data repositories must support Dublin Core as a metadata scheme. Given this it is entirely possible to harvest content from a remote site, parse the incoming data, and save it to MyLibrary database with ease. Similarly, one could dump sets of MARC records, map their contents to Dublin Core, and create MyLibrary content accordingly. Such a thing would be a simple library catalog.

The most difficult thing when it comes to MyLibrary information resources are the locations. Think of locations as pointers to content. In the case of the Internet, these locations are usually URL’s, but they can just as easily be call numbers, shelf numbers, or even buildings on a campus. Used creatively, locations can be pointers to full text or complete records. Suppose you imported MARC records, your location could be a pointer to the full-text of the MARC record saved on your computer. Read the MARC record through the location to “show details.”

Similarly, use the description field creatively. Why settle for an abstract when you can have the full-text? Create a MyLibrary resource. Call it The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Give it a creator. Give it a few subjects. Stuff the full text of the book (maybe even as a  TEI-encoded text) into the description field.

Thus, MyLibrary resources are not limited to describing Internet resources, but just about anything.

Tags: General Information //