On my Sept 29 post, I lamented the difficulty of capturing our memberships’ unique knowledge. I appreciated Betsy’s comment because she confirmed that this is profession wide problem. Betsy’s comment also made me responsible for solving a problem I had identified.
I started thinking of ways to solving this. Bibliographies posted on web sites and blogs didn’t satisfy me. I wanted a note attached to a bibliographic record. I didn’t want users to have to go through steps outside of their original search.
I called my OCLC rep as I always do when I have a question about cataloging. Lynne Graziadei came to my aid. Worldcat.org, released in beta format in August, allows for comments about an item. This comment field allows for notes not appropriate to the marc record. Lynne said that OCLC is involved in social networking projects and this is one demonstration of those efforts.
Since this is a beta project, we can experiment. If people are interested about developing law librarian related applications with this, please contact me.
Dear Jacqueline,
ReplyDeleteIs this something that either a consortium like NELLCO or one or more AALL sections might work on as a project? It seems like either the OBS/RS SIS group might have an interest. Maybe it could be something as simple as sending questions to the listserve (LawLib) when weeding, to ask if and how often titles are used in the firms, courts, county and academic libraries. Then that collected answer could be compiled into a searchable file and archived, maybe.