Fascinating Facts.....(1)
One of the huge benefits of having a national aggregated dataset of holdings is that you can start to derive some really interesting information about UK libraries. Many things could become possible if that dataset could be refreshed in real-time , for example we could map trends, like ILL transactions, purchasing patterns and borrower activity around particular titles or subject areas. But that's in the future....
Right now, we are harvesting records at a phenomenal rate. The structure of Source enables libraries to submit records as complete MARC records (UKMarc or Marc21). Source hangs the holdings record off the bibliographic record and we take British Library data as the core bibliographic dataset. However, over the last two months we have witnessed a huge increase in the number of new bibliographic records being created. These are records being submitted by libraries, where no bibliographic record previously existed. I'm guessing that if the BL doesn't have that record as part of its core data, then we are looking at some pretty obscure items. 800,000 new items to be precise, now discoverable for the first time that weren't there two months ago - as the graph below illustrates. And of course in the context of Source now available for interloan.
