The vision for consortia
The Share Family technology is adaptable to the specific needs of library consortia, for their transition to linked open data. The LOD Platform technology can support consortia achieve greater visibility, cost savings, and collaborative innovation, all while maintaining each institution’s autonomy and unique identity.
- High-Quality Data & Resource Sharing: collaborate to ensure sustainable and accurate data management, facilitating seamless resource sharing and retention policies across institutions. Increased visibility allows for greater discoverability of specialized data, transforming catalogues into comprehensive research tools across all disciplines and languages.
- Autonomy & Interoperability: retain full control over local systems while enabling integration with a range of Library Service Platforms via custom APIs. Access shared cataloguing, entity-oriented editing, persistent identifiers, resource sharing, print registry, and a consortia-wide data warehouse to support collaborative collection development analysis.
- Community Governance & Cost Efficiency: play an active role in shaping the future of library data through involvement in the Share Advisory Council and Working Groups. Realize significant cost savings for member institutions with shared services and resources, while ensuring that each member may continue to manage its metadata independently.
Among the potential use cases for consortia cooperation it’s worth mentioning:
- centralised bibliographic information services for end users, supported by tools for the management of bibliographic information remotely: that is, starting from the Instance and from the data related to the specific physical resource (Item), the user could access direct communication channels with the institution that owns the resource, in order to get additional information;
- loan services can be configured either as a local loan, and therefore mainly addressed to the internal users of the institution, or as an inter-system and/or inter-library loan, between institutions connected by specific agreements for the exchange of resources;
- resource sharing tools integrating the reconciled data with shared print and shared e-resources services;
- shared print retention policies;
- collection analysis, e.g. aggregating collection information at item level;
- open data sharing and reuse for all types of users;
- data curation for professional users through JCricket.
This integration provides consortium members with access to advanced functions such as collaborative cataloging, automated authority control, URI enrichment, and linked data conversion. Customized integrations are available to connect the bibliographic catalogs and authority files of different libraries, presenting their data in dynamic formats to enhance visibility and engagement with resources and collections.
How to join
The collaboration with library consortia and networks of institutions working with shared practices has been reinforced. The Share Family Executive Summary for Consortia laid the groundwork for devising use cases to apply LOD Platform methodologies, tools and components to support consortia in adopting linked data.
To find out more about the opportunities, options and advantages available and to get involved contact us at info@share-family.org.
