An OAI-based Approach to Build and Maintain Union Catalogue of OPACs

Libraries world-over are facing an economic crisis due to the imbalance in skyrocketing of subscription prices and shrinking or at best stable library budgets. Librarians have long ago realized the fact that however rich their collections are, they will not be able to meet the ever growing demands of their clientele. And, for this very reason, the inter library loan (ILL) service was started by the librarians so that it could, to some extent, supplement their collections. However, for the ILL service to be effective, the participating libraries in the ILL service should have their online public access catalogues (OPACs) in place. Also, having a union catalogue (a centralized database) of the participating libraries will make the service more efficient. Past experiences in creating and maintaining union catalogues clearly reveal that maintaining the currency of the union catalogues is not an easy task, especially, if the processes of obtaining the updates of the OPACs from the member libraries and updating the union catalogue involve manual procedures. In this paper, we propose an OAI-based approach to build and maintain union catalogues. In this approach the individual OPACs (data providers) expose their metadata for harvesting. The OAI-based service providers harvest the exposed metadata automatically. The metadata thus harvested is ingested into a centralized database, which will serve as an online union catalogue, supporting search, browse, and other valueadded functionalities for the end-users. The OAI-based approach will eliminate the manual work involved in getting the OAPC updates and also in updating the union catalogues.