Jisc and OCLC have announced a partnership to build a new shared service that will aggregate academic bibliographic data at scale, improving library collection management and resource discovery for students and researchers. Jisc has announced that OCLC, the global library cooperative, has been awarded the contract to develop a new national bibliographic knowledgebase (NBK).
The NBK, originally proposed in the national monograph strategy, will support the learning and research needs of the UK higher education community. The vision is to extend the capabilities of the current Copac service, by investing in technology that can ingest diverse library data at higher speed and greater volume. The new service will enable a shift in the way that libraries manage their print and digital collections and in the ways that people access those resources.
The library community is grappling with two core challenges as budgets come under threat - firstly, the need to make important decisions about the ongoing management of their print and digital book collections; and secondly, to ensure that researchers and learners have sustainable and convenient access to digital books.
The NBK is regarded as a key element in the delivery against these issues, providing a source of information that libraries can confidently rely upon when making decisions about the future of the resources that they manage and make accessible.
Supported by WorldCat, the world's largest aggregation of library data, the project is due to start in January 2017, with launch of a beta service projected in January 2018.
Brought to you by Scope e-Knowledge Center, a world-leading provider of metadata services, abstraction, indexing, entity extraction and knowledge organisation models (Taxonomies, Thesauri and Ontologies).
