Register Locally - Discover Globally

On Monday 31 March a second meeting of the Global Registries Initiative took place at the University of Southampton, UK. The initial meeting was held in Washington DC, USA on December 10 2007.

With the slogan "Register Locally - Discover Globally", the initiative aims to enable sharing of collection descriptions and serivce details across registries, thus making them discoverable globally.

The three registries that have begun this initiative are the Australian ORCA registry of repository collections, the US OCKHAM registry of the National Science Digital Library, and the UK JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) of collection descriptions and services that provide access to them.

Currently this initiative is at a discussion stage, with an international workshop planned for later this year. I expect that this workshop will include the development of use cases.

The architecture for the initiative still needs to be discussed, but it will certainly be standards-based. All three of the registries currently involved describe resources using the IESR metadata schema, although with some differences, e.g. with nationally relevant property values. The collection description part of the IESR metadata schema is based on the Dublin Core Collections Application Profile, which is now endorsed by the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. To cope with the differences in use of the IESR schema in the implementation of the three registries, an interchange format may be developed.

The devlopment of the ORCA registry was guided ISO2146 "Registry Services for Libraries and Related Organisations".

IESR already has experience of harvesting resource descriptions from other catalogues using OAI-PMH. Thus I would expect the first prototype experiments of the Global Registries Initiative will involve sharing records by OAI-PMH.