Do your library catalogue and repository talk to each other? Report now available
A JISC funded study by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde on the links between library catalogues and institutional repositories has just been made available.
The study found limited technical interoperability between library systems, institutional repositories and other institutional systems. You’ll find an announcement about the report, and links to it, HERE
The report makes a number of recommendations about how this situation could be improved.
Recommendations for universities looking to make improvements in this area include:
- Improving co-ordination between the departments responsible for institutional information systems to reduce duplication of effort and increase the efficiency of workflows
- Making it clear to the information seeker what types of information the library catalogue and the digital repository each cover
- Describing the same types of resources consistently in the library catalogue and digital repository
- Improving the consistency and quality of subject descriptors, classification and author naming in digital repositories and using the same standards for these as the library catalogue as far as possible
The report illustrates the growing use of ‘resource discovery platforms’ (such as Primo) as a way of providing more ‘joined up’ searching across catalogues and repositories but sees them as a partial solution.
You might also be interested in a recent RELATED REPORT on links between repositories and research management systems.
I’d welcome your comments on the following ‘where next’ questions that occur to me or any other issues that occur to you in reading the report.
How big an issue is lack of interoperability between your library catalogue and repository for you at a day to day level?
Do you see Resource Discovery Platforms (such as Primo) as a way of providing the information seeker with a more coherent view of what is available to them from their ‘local’ catalogue and repository and with simpler access?
How big an issue is managing the quality of metadata in repositories for you?
Is there a clear enough benefit to your institution of better integration between its systems that hold information about its research outputs to justify and motivate the effort required to achieve it?
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I have to say that the style for this website is one of the worst I have ever seen. The links in the above posting from the word “here” and the word “related report” just do not stand out. Having them distinguished only by being dark purple rather than black is insufficient!
Thanks Matthew. Fair point - those links are rather buried in quite a long post. As a quick fix, I have capitalised the words in question to make the links stand out more. In the meantime, we are investigating adjusting the style applied to the blog to improve the visibility of embedded links.