I'm planning on moving ahead with a proof-of-concept in the next year, 
after which I will certainly consider writing it up.

I really hope I can get the go-ahead from database vendors. It's good to 
hear that a few institutions have successfully negotiated with 
them--anyone from Los Alamos, the Scholars Portals, or any other local 
indexers feel free to give me pointers on smooth-talking the vendors! :)

I also hope you're wrong in maintaining, in the article you linked to, 
that "using controlled vocabularies for retrieval will never work well 
across databases that use different vocabularies." The (admittedly 
arduous and complex) work of crosswalking library-created controlled 
vocabularies like LCSH to periodical index thesauri and other formal and 
less-formal indexing languages out in the wild is *exactly* what I think 
librarians should be spending their time doing. Catalogers (and I 
include myself) spend a lot of time making largely irrelevant tweaks to 
already-existing MARC records before exporting them into our local 
ILSes, but article-level metadata from vendors is generally served up to 
the user as-is.

I think Roy Tennant, as quoted in your article, is spot-on when he says 
that "our inability to do any preprocessing of the data is a major 
hindrance." The data sources we subscribe to should be seen as starting 
points for generating a user experience, rather than letting the vendors 
decide what the discovery process is going to be like.

Cory

On 7/1/2010 11:39 AM, Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
> I am eager to see you try it, Cory. Please consider writing up your 
> results for the Code4Lib Journal. I'd be curious to hear the complete 
> story, from issues of getting metadata, to issues of the technical 
> infrastructure, any metadata normalization you need to do, issues of 
> continuing to get the metadata on a regular basis, etc.
> Whether you succeed or fail, but especially if you succeed, your 
> project with just a couple databases could serve as a useful "pilot" 
> for people considering doing it with more.
>
> Jonathan

-- 
Cory Rockliff
Technical Services Librarian
Bard Graduate Center: Decorative Arts, Design History, Material Culture
18 West 86th Street
New York, NY 10024
T: (212) 501-3037
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