Speaker
Mr
Markus SKöLD
(National Library of Sweden)
Description
Svensk Mediedatabas (SMDB) is the national catalogue for audiovisual material in Sweden. It has gone through multiple stages of automation and digitization and as of today it makes up a complete system platform for the audiovisual department of the national library of Sweden.
Each day more than 1.5TB of audiovisual material is ingested together with corresponding metadata in a fully automated manner. More than 2.500.000 hours of material is directly viewable in the system and another 5 million hours are available via on-demand digitization.
The first version of the catalogue interface was based on technical and biographical requirements rather than actual user needs; even if it provided all the functions needed it was complex and not very intuitive to use. Nor was the support for external search services such as Google satisfactory.
Late 2008 a decision was made to split all middleware business logic into a bus architecture and keep the web frontend clean and simple. The idea was to create a web application which felt clean and modern rather than your traditional OPAC, and also to make sure the data was accessible for others to use.
Today, all data is served from the bus in a native XML format which can easily be transformed to many different formats accessible via a single API. This effectively publishes our metadata and makes it available to third party applications. By utilizing Cool URIs all catalogue entries has their own unique URI, something that has eased search engine optimization.
During the session we will explain what we have done so far and tell you our plans for the future and why we need to be where our users are by making sure our data is accessible in a wide variety of ways; e.g. semantic web, linked data.
Author
Mr
Markus SKöLD
(National Library of Sweden)
