[DCRM-L] CERL as an alternative for OCLC?

[Erin Blake]

There already is an organization that has made great strides with rare materials bibliographic data and linked data: CERL (Consortium of European Research Libraries). Unfortunately, the Folger is not a member (yet!) so I can't access the Heritage of the Printed Book Database<file:///\\fsldc02\eblake$\Art%20Vault%20Renovation> (HPB) to find examples, but their other databases and thesauri are available online for free.

CERL hosted meetings in New York in January designed to persuade American research libraries to follow Yale's example and join the consortium. Caroline Duroselle-Melish and I were there to represent the Folger, but I'm afraid I can't remember exactly who all else was present.

RLIN libraries will remember being able to search the HPB when it was part of RLG (back then HPB stood for "Hand Press Book Database"). The difference between what has happened with the HPB data in the years since RLG disappeared, and what happened with RLIN data, is telling.

CERL's Material Evidence in Incunabula<http://www.cerl.org/resources/mei/main> database (MEI) is a particularly good example: it pulls bibliographic data from the Incunabula Short Title Catalogue<http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/istc/> and allows copy-specific provenance evidence to be attached in time-specific chunks with links to thesauri. For example: http://incunabula.cerl.org/cgi-bin/record.pl?rid=il00023000 brings up the record for a book with multiple copies. Click on "more" for the Bodleian copy and you'll see that it has three time-specific chunks of provenance information based on physical evidence:

1.       An inscription and price on an endleaf let us know that it was in Bologna, owned by Christoph Scheurl, when it was new (late 16th century)

2.       The binding lets us know that it was in Frankfurt-am-Main, owned by Georg Franz Burkhard Kloss, in the 18th century

3.       Oxford shelfmarks let us know it's been in Oxford, owned by the University, from 1834 or 5 to the present
All those places and owners are picked from drop-down menus of data in linked thesauri, and the dates are encoded. Other fields indicate levels of certainty about the data. The former owner's authority record points back to books he owned. The time and geographic information can be linked to a map with a time-slider and you can watch the book move from Bologna to Frankfurt to Oxford.

Speaking on my own, and not for my institution (where we're still in shock) I'm much more inclined to devote cataloging efforts to CERL's infrastructure, where copy-specific details are valued and machine-actionable, than to OCLC's infrastructure, where they're not.

Erin.

________

Erin C. Blake, Ph.D.  |  Head of Collection Information Services  |  Folger Shakespeare Library  |  201 E. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC, 20003  |  eblake at folger.edu<mailto:eblake at folger.edu>  |  office tel. +1 202-675-0323<tel:%2B1%20202-675-0323>  |  fax +1 202-675-0328<tel:%2B1%20202-675-0328>  |  www.folger.edu<http://www.folger.edu/>

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