On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 5:24 PM Fitchett, Deborah <
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> Kia ora koutou,
>
> Any attempt at actually doing this is far beyond my capabilities or
> resources but I feel strongly that there’s a need for this, so I’m thinking
> aloud about whether it’s actually practical – would love anyone else’s
> thoughts!
>
> To date there’ve been a number of successful open-source catalogue systems
> – Koha, Evergreen, the current FOLIO project. Discovery layers seem to have
> been left out of scope of all of these.
>
> My impression is that the main reason for this is the problem of the
> metadata index. Metadata is hoarded by for-profit vendors; some of them
> only grudgingly work with the Big Discover Layer companies under strict
> conditions (and possibly with money changing hands, I don’t know…) so would
> be unlikely to just hand it over to a community project. No metadata, no
> discovery layer.
>
> But more and more, metadata is becoming available through other sources.
> Crossref is the biggest and most obvious, and then there’s hundreds or
> thousands of institutional repositories. So my thought is, is it now
> becoming possible to create an index at least tolerably suitable for an
> open-source discovery layer, using open-access metadata sources?
>
> And if so… how hard would it be?
>
> What are the “must have” components (index; search interface;
> API/integrations so the library can index its own holdings from whatever
> ILS it uses, and harvest from institutional repositories; API/integrations
> to display real-time availability of said holdings; OpenURL to link out to
> link resolvers; institution accounts if cloud-hosted so the library can
> configure this stuff plus look-and-feel; some way for librarians to
> contribute corrections to faulty metadata…)
>
> And what are the “nice to have” components (link resolver functionality?
> Citation trails? …)
>
> Deborah


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