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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 [log in to unmask] --- [This E-mail scanned for viruses by Declude Virus]