Online Catalogue to Boost Troubled UK Libraries

www.optelec.com : Newcastle City Library

An online national index of all public library catalogues is being developed to help make library stock more visible in internet searches, with the aim of driving traffic to library websites and increasing use of the libraries themselves.

An online national index of all public library catalogues is being developed to help make library stock more visible in internet searches, with the aim of driving traffic to library websites and increasing use of the libraries themselves.

The ‘national public library union catalogue’ ( http://bit.ly/gjdHGx ) will contain bibliographic data provided by up to 90% of libraries in England and Wales, with some data from Scottish libraries as well, and will be freely available over the internet.

The project is the result of collaboration between the global library collective OCLC (the Online Computer Library Center – http://www.oclc.org ) and The Combined Regions ( http://www.combinedregions.com ), an organisation promoting co-operation between UK libraries. The partners believe it will increase the prominence of public library stock through web searches using popular search engines like Google and Yahoo!

Katie Birch, director of delivery services at OCLC, told E-Government Bulletin that there has always been a need for a publicly available national union catalogue. “We’re looking to drive traffic into libraries, that’s the goal – making the public aware of the services and stock that libraries have, and linking them to their local library at a point where the user can see the individual item they’ve searched for.”

The new catalogue will be “transformative”, said Birch, and could bring about big change to the hundreds of libraries across the UK currently threatened with closure as a result of government budget cuts to local authorities.

The project is currently in its initial stages, with a ‘proof of concept’ – based on limited library catalogue databases – to be available to libraries in April, who can then provide full catalogue data to the project.

(E-Government Bulletin issue 327)