Predictive copy cataloguing
Corey Harper, Metadata Services Librarian at Bobst Library NYU, said this over on the NGC4LIB mailing list He was talking in the context of using RDF as the underliying storage mechanism for a catalog:
“Imagine if OCLC’s database were built around this principle, and a
nightly SPARQL query could retrieve any statement Doug made about a
resource when he added a field or subfield, and add it to the data-pool
of a local catalog. Imagine then that another query could pull in the
tags that Bob added to Library Thing and the reviews Sarah posted on Amazon.”
OK, so you have pulled in these RDF triples that are related
to the item in your hand. You can then pick from the presented
triples to decide what actually makes it into your own local
catalogue.
And then there is the attention data that can be gathered from not
only the fields _you_ chose, but the fields _Doug_ chose, so that the
most popular (you could set levels) will make up your record – and you
can add in the extra ones that you want – adding to the attention data
pool. You could even group the attention data by the type of library
who used it, so be able to pick all the medical fields, or all the
social science fields.
I’d call it predictive copy cataloguing.