A cross section of library types has stepped up to the plate to be part of the solution. National, academic, and rare book and manuscript libraries, as well as public library systems, are participating in Zepheira’s many training sessions and are becoming more aware of the significant opportunities for leadership roles in developing and using the shared vocabularies necessary for the web to understand the concept of libraries. By year-end, about 100 institutions will have gone through the training and taken some action (e.g., an assessment of readiness to move forward). Jeff Penka, Zepheira’s director of channel and product development, expects that during the next 3–6 years, there will be enormous changes in what libraries look like during a web search and in how the web drives people back into the library.According to its FAQ section, the Libhub Initiative expects that it “can deliver on the promise of BIBFRAME and have library results presented at or near the top of page results.” Only then will a “modest subscription service” be initiated “that would have a Library export existing and subsequent additions and deletions to the Libhub/BIBFRAME cloud service.”
Why Libraries Should (and How They Can) Participate
The Libhub Initiative presents three reasons to participate in the project. While the rationale is phrased a bit defensively, the expanded explanations are designed to ignite the imagination:
- It allows libraries to have a strong voice in the transition away from proprietary systems. (Hopefully, vendors will adopt the BIBFRAME standard, enabling libraries to participate more easily.)
- It demonstrates that libraries can transform their role in today’s world. “The Libhub Initiative provides a proving ground for the effectiveness of the new BIBFRAME standard, identifies opportunities for refinements/improvement and accelerates community adoption by demonstrating the impact of BIBFRAME in a tangible way.”
- It develops an immediate on-ramp to and provides resources for the library community to make the transition. The Libhub Initiative “is key to accelerating adoption and speeding the return of libraries to the forefront of people’s minds as an information resource.”
As Eric Miller, co-founder and president of Zepheira, notes: “Collaborative community participation will give this Initiative the greatest likelihood of meaningful impact. The Web really showcases that we are stronger together than we are apart.” Librarians can participate in the Libhub Initiative by doing the following:
- Identifying providers that should be involved in the effort
- Suggesting content to highlight
- Inviting colleagues and peers to join
All a library needs to do to participate is export its existing MARC records. It can continue to load its records into its current environment—the Libhub Initiative works in parallel with existing discovery layers and OPACs. But with BIBFRAME, a person using a search engine might click on library data presented in a set of results returned by a general web search and then be taken to the OPAC.
On Oct. 27, Zepheira will participate in Linked Data for Libraries: From Experimentation to Practice at Scale, a session at the 2014 DLF (Digital Library Federation) Forum. According to the program, “This panel presents a view of four diverse, larger-scale, linked data efforts where the ‘rubber is meeting the road.’ Each of the panelists will briefly present an overview of their efforts. A moderated discussion will follow, giving the panelists and audience a chance to compare and contrast approaches, and the larger implications for libraries of this potentially disruptive innovation.”
Other library linked-data initiatives that will be represented by the panel are Linked Data for Libraries (LD4L), an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded collaboration of Cornell, Harvard, and Stanford university libraries; BIBFLOW, an IMLS-funded project of the UC–Davis University Library and Zepheira; and an OCLC initiative. For those who are not able to make it to Atlanta for the conference, it is hoped that Zepheira will share its presentation on the Libhub Initiative website and that the DLF will post a webcast of the session so that other libraries can learn about these exciting developments.
