Be seen or not to be seen, that is the MARC question?

Library are like a tree or I will say library internet presence is like a tree. It stands boldly alone in a jungle of digital information. If your library becomes part of a system or a consortium/network of Libraries, they may unite and have a stronger presence in the digital world.

In general, however, your grove is lost in the broader forest. Biodiversity is great for ecosystems—just not for your library’s web presence and Symphony SirsiDynix LMS (picture below) couldn’t stand a chance on his own.

Search engine such as Google, Amazon, Wikipedia make it difficult for libraries to be seen. Algorithms favour large, popular sites. It is incredibly difficult for a single library to climb up the ranks of search engine results, when internet giants like Wikipedia dominate the top tiers. Even a large, urban library that serves a population of more than 500,000 will pale in comparison to Wikipedia’s 29 million registered users.

In addition to popularity, library’s web presence is limited because MARC records aren’t readable by the Semantic Web. MARC was created in 1960 before the popularisation of the internet and before Google was even an idea. Libraries eagerly cast aside their card catalogues and jumped on the MARC system, unable to anticipate the limitations of the new standard.

Library collections can be accessed via the internet, but individuals have to know to go to the library catalogue to look at the items in the collection. Today most searches for information start on a search engine, and Wikipedia with its millions of users almost always land at the top of the search results. No matter how relevant or authoritative your collection items might be, there’s no way for your records to land on a results page because Google, Bing, and Yahoo can’t read your records. So not only are you a small tree, you’re an invisible tree.

Let’s look at London public libraries for example. The London Libraries Consortium (LLC) is a business partnership of 18 London public library services committed to delivering excellence. This is done by sharing resources in IT, stock management etc.. A new concept was adopted in 2003: “Linked Data” which saw the creation of the London Library Consortium (LLC) website, accessible through https://llc.overdrive.com .The platform was specifically designed by Axiell multi software authority, so partners can share a single LMS and still retain local control. The biggest problem: invisibility was partially conquered.

Using “Linked Data” to gain visibility, for a consortium of libraries still stand small and outnumbered in the forest. You may have a collection of a few hundred thousand, which makes for a good-sized tree. But this forest has some redwoods in it, like our earlier example Wikipedia. Wikipedia has over 5 million content pages in English alone.

Library’s content is invisible to search engines because MARC records are not harvestable or understood by the Web. However a system such as BLUEcloud Visibility could be the solution. It resolves this issue by transforming necessary MARC records into connected Linked Data resources. Linked Data is readable by the Web, so now your collection can be a visible part of the forest.

The next step is to publish your records to the Web via the Library.Link Network. It uses data formats that search engine algorithms use to make library content visible. Search results are based on algorithms that favour authoritative data. Search engines favour sites with high traffic, significant linking from other sites, and frequent content updates; these features are considered indicators of authority, popularity, usefulness, and relevance. BLUEcloud Visibility and the Library.Link Network help libraries fulfill all these requirements.

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