Abstract:
Modern Libraries significantly changed their shape during the last 20 years. It changed from a primarily book and journals oriented archive and service institution to an institution of distributing, broking and valuing information and knowledge both on a subject and meta matter level. In addition, it changed from a dominantly material fundus to a mixed fundus regarding quality, format, accessibility et cetera. Finally, it opened up to a broad public environment not only in a local or regional perspective, but also to the international, global and multilingual context.
These changes significantly affect the functions of public libraries, especially those designed for higher education, teacher training, further education and lifelong learning.
Library metadata was created to describe objects and enable a reader to understand when they had the same or a different object in hand. Now linked data concepts and techniques are allowing us to recreate, merge, and link our metadata assets in new ways that better support discovery - both in our local systems and on the wider web. Tennant will describe this migration and the potential it has for solving key discovery problems.
