Convegno ITALENuovi modelli per nuovi scenari

I sistemi bibliotecari italiani di fronte alle trasformazioni della società della conoscenza

Certosa di Pontignano (Siena) 19 - 20 aprile 2010

Opac & dintorni: essere o non essere nella rete

Antonio Scolari (Università degli studi di Pavia)

OPACs still have a necessary role in preserving access to library collections, maintaining a consistent and authoritative form of bibliographic control and providing a targeted information environment for specific client groups

David Wells, ‘What is a library OPAC?’, The Electronic Library, 25 (2007), 386 - 394 (pag. 386) <doi:10.1108/02640470710779790>).

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The World-Wide Web has become the people's encyclopedia of choice. Google and other web search engines give people a good start, and, in fact, with Wikipedia links in hand, it gives them a running start, for building on their bare-bones, basic knowledge of a topic. The web also satisfies people's voracious appetites for full texts … . Instead of strolling in the library stacks to find a book, people want to stay put in their homes and offices and retrieve full texts with a click of a button.

(K. Markey, “The online library catalog: paradise lost and paradise regained?”, D-Lib Magazine, 12 (2007) <www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey. html>)

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I numeri di Google

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OCLC adds new MARC Records for items in Google Books and Hathi TrustDigital collections to WorldCat - 06 Apr 2010

Global library cooperative Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC),US, has announced that it is adding records to WorldCat that representdigitised books from the Google Books Library Project and the HathiTrustDigital Library to provide greater access to and increased visibility ofthese digitised collections.

OCLC is working with libraries, Google and the HathiTrust to derive newMARC records that represent these digital collections based on the richcollection of print records contributed to WorldCat by the OCLCmembership over the last 40 years. Searchers will begin seeing theserecords in WorldCat immediately. OCLC will continue to add records forthese collections to WorldCat on an ongoing basis. WorldCat searcherswill be able to locate digitised books from these collections and linkto the associated book landing page. Also, in some cases, searchers willbe able to access the full text of eBooks available through these initiatives.

HathiTrust was conceived as a collaboration of the 13 universities ofthe Committee on Institutional Cooperation and the University ofCalifornia system to establish a repository for these universities toarchive and share their digitised collections. OCLC and the HathiTrustare working together to implement a public interface for the HathiTrustcatalogue through a WorldCat Local interface, to be introduced later this year.

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Research community members seek to resolve author name ambiguity issue - 07 Dec 2009Various members of the research community have announced their intent to collaborate to resolve the existing author name ambiguity problem in scholarly communication. Together, the group hopes to develop an open, independent identification system for scholarly authors. This follows the first Name Identifier Summit held last month in Cambridge, MA, by Thomson Reuters and Nature Publishing Group, where a cross-section of the research community explored approaches to address name ambiguity. A follow-on meeting of this group took place in London last week to discuss the next steps.

Accurate identification of researchers and their work is seen as key for the transition from science to e-science, wherein scholarly publications can be mined to spot links and ideas hidden in the growing volume of scholarly literature. A disambiguated set of authors will allow new services and benefits to be built for the research community by all stakeholders in scholarly communication: from commercial actors to non-profit organisations, from governments to universities.

The organisations that have agreed to work together to overcome the contributor identification issue include: American Institute of Physics, American Psychological Association, Association for Computing Machinery, British Library, CrossRef, Elsevier, European Molecular Biology Organisation, Hindawi, INSPIRE (project of CERN, DESY, Fermilab, SLAC), Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries, Nature Publishing Group, Public Library of Science, ProQuest, SAGE Publications Inc., Springer, Thomson Reuters, University College London, University of Manchester (JISC Names Project), University of Vienna, Wellcome Trust and Wiley-Blackwell. 

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In the post mass digitization era, every word and phrase from millions of digital texts of all literary genres will be at the fingertips of online library catalog users. Giving users a Boolean-based system to search digitized texts is comparable to giving Captain Kirk a Mercury-era space capsule to travel the galaxy

(K. Markey, “The online library catalog: paradise lost and paradise regained?”, D-Lib Magazine, 12 (2007) <www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey. html>)

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“The most popular features among the three users’ surveys are relevance ranking and borrowing suggestions. Evidently, users want borrowing suggestions for the next-generation OPACs. In addition, supported by two survey results, relevance ranking is also desired by users. In contrast, the least popular features among the surveys are RSS feeds and user reviews. These two features are related to Web 2.0. Nearly all the “least popular” features in each survey are also related to Web 2.0, i.e. “ability to tag items”, “create library profile to display research interests”, “your recent searches”, “sort by popularity”, “add your own book comments”, “RSS Feeds”. This shows that users seem less interested or familiar with Web 2.0 ideas. From the table, it may be concluded that library users prefer features that can improve the searching experience rather than those that emphasise participation and social uses of the OPAC”

Winnie Tam, Andrew M. Cox, e Andy Bussey, ‘Student user preferences for features of next’, Program: electronic library and information systems, 43 (2009), >, p. 355 <doi:10.1108/00330330910998020> 19

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«… l’OPAC ha bisogno di essere rivisto, quindi una sua semplificazione sarebbe molto utile e anche la sperimentazione di meccanismi di collaborazione con gli utenti risulterebbe interessante. Con un progetto, però, e verificandone i risultati passo per passo. Senza vuote ideologie e soprattutto mettendo da parte gli entusiasmi ingiustificati.»

(Fabio Metitieri, «L’OPAC collaborativo, tra folksonomia e socialità», in Biblioteche oggi, XXVII (2009), n. 2, p. 12)

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