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WP4: Catalogues and MetaOPAC

The WP4 is intended to harmonise catalogues and OPAC in order to:

  • promote initiatives to standardise data and bibliographic and authority control systems;
  • develop a MetaOPAC, which allows an integrated access to bibliographic and documentary resources and services, provided by the libraries participating in the Project.

For this purpose, the MetaOPAC will be developed through IT systems based on open platforms and technologies. This tool will be one stop-shop user oriented access point to all the bibliographic resources available within the S&T Digital Library.

The system will be designed as a Semantic Opac (SOPAC), in order to facilitate user interaction. The SOPAC will use text mining techniques and solutions, structured into folksontologies.

The Social Semantic Opac will:

  • adapt to the users social and cultural behaviours and practices;
  • rely on a well-established collaborative library network;
  • integrate social networking and social tagging tools (using open source applications), in order to allow users to keep track of their own readings through comments and reviews and to organise documents in an ontology-based fashion. The goal is to connect traditional semantic indexing methods to the most recent folksonomies;
  • integrate the library catalogue in an Integrated Library System (ILS) with social networking-like functionalities.

A preliminary review phase of the different OPAC and bibliographic databases owned by participant libraries will allow their harmonisation and enrichment and a gradual implementation of the SOPAC.

In order to integrate the different information systems, appropriate solutions to connect technical, organisational and technological activities of WP4 to those of WP2 (Resources Purchase), WP3 (Portal), WP6 (Repository Platform) and WP10 (Digital Preservation) are used.