September 23, 2010 – The changes happening with how metadata is edited and enhanced continue to create collaboration opportunities. The change we are now seeing is that bibliographic data is being edited more in a wiki style than in the ways it was in the past. This indicates that there is a big increase in the collaborative editing of shared bibliographic records.
This information was found in an interesting post on Examiner.com titled, “A Wiki-Like Approach to Metadata Editing” It seems the place where this collaboration has been most evident is in the OCLC WorldCat database, the world’s largest bibliographic database. In 2009, OCLC eliminated many of the restrictions it had on editing the bibliographic records in its database, greatly expanding the number of institutions authorized to edit records. Now we can observe a wiki-like process for editing records by the catalogers in the WorldCat database.
Thus far, this change has proved to be a good thing for them. More and more shared metadata is being collaboratively edited, a change that benefits the database users.
This was a restricted and controlled space; wonder how that would play out in a different environment?
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
