Rod
- What about library catalogues. Surely a lot of literature will have
an electronic card catalogue somewhere? What about WorldCat - http://www.oclc.org/worldcat/. Is it not possible to search global library cataologues to extract basic metadata about a lot of literature, or am I being - as usual - hopelessly naive?
It's true, there are electronic sources of some of this information, and it's possible that we are capturing in IPNI some information which is then _also_ captured (from the same journal) in the Kew Record and then _also_ captured (at least for books) by the library catalogue So a central place where some of the metadata - especially horrible hairy things like DOIs and ISBNs - could be captured once and re-used might be helpful ESPECIALLY if the source was from the publisher itself (that's what Amazon makes you do, after all) - someone with an incentive to get it right and correct it if it's wrong. Actually just doing it once at Kew would be an improvement (but we'd need to actually write the tools to do that). Of course, there will be no substitute for the editors actually scanning (ie. with their eyes) the literature themselves to check that everything is present and correct - descriptions, types and so on. And the KR team are looking for different things as well - everyone has additional information they need from a publication that they will want to extract.
The more I think about it the more I can see that we do need a really good robust system for identifying and cross linking all these things. DOIs will do part of it, but I guess BHL will have to cover the rest ... As to whether we end up with something centralised or standardised, I haven't really thought about it enough to say ...
Sally *** Sally Hinchcliffe *** Computer section, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew *** tel: +44 (0)20 8332 5708 *** S.Hinchcliffe@rbgkew.org.uk