Abstract
The United Kingdom boasts union catalogues for its major research libraries, journal holdings, archives and, most recently, for its public library collections. For researchers wanting to locate material across the UK, such aggregations have long served as a first stop for researchers wanting to find the right material and also provided a showcase for our formidable research collections.
In the global networked environment, search engines and social networks can fulfil much of the functionality of union catalogues and have become the natural places to which our users go for search and discovery, even in academic situations.
Right now, there is a ‘disconnect’ between the data describing our collections and the places users first turn to start their searches. This can be fixed by exposing descriptive data to wider audiences beyond the silo of the local catalogue, but data publishing is a fast moving area with little obvious short-term institutional-level gain and some start-up barriers.
Publishing library data to the open web at the level of a national aggregation would utilize existing skill sets and infrastructure, minimize risk and maximize impact.