Ebook integration has advanced into the must-have category of features for any online catalog or discovery product oriented to public libraries. The ability to implement this feature depends on the availability of APIs exposed by the ebook lending services.
While libraries pre-date the book, in the past few centuries our identity as an institution centered around our role as the primary repository of knowledge for our communities. Our collections were mostly in the form textual books stored on our shelves It is in the past twenty years or so, that what we thought of as a book has shifted to include new, electronic forms of the book that co-exist with our print copies.
As the book publishing systems has evolved and changed, so too has our ability to describe the books properties and relationships with other books, local and national subjects, along with authors and title. The family of MARC standards; Bibliographic, Authority, and Holdings records, are how these relationships were describing a book in the classic Book publishing system.
Using linked data - a way to make assertions about artifacts that has global scope with sharded URIs - libraries have the opportunity to deeply enrich their local collections through connecting with local, regional, national, and international sources of linked data. The new Library of Congress BIBFRAME along with the Schema.org linked data vocabularies are examples of organizing assertions about artifacts.
With more organizations releasing their interfaces to their data, Linked Data holds the promise of embedding and merging data-sources such as DBpedia (structured information extracted from Wikipedia), WorldCat, VIVO, Library of Congress Authorities and Vocabularies, and VIAF.
For many years, the book was the bibliographic entity that libraries described with MARC21 and AACR2. Note fields in the MARC record allowed for some information about the contents of the book to be included in the record but the book's chapters and certainly not paragraphs are not described and available through our catalog the catalog.
Less granularity to More granularity |
Book Chapter Paragraph Word |
Serial or Periodical Issue Article Paragraph Word |
Musical Recording Play list Song Sample |
Video Video Clip Screenshot |