In 2010, the first doctoral thesis was defended at the Faculty of Documentation Sciences of the Complutense University of Madrid under the title, Applications of Syndication for the Management of Bibliographic Catalogs. The research objective focuses on studying the applications of content syndication techniques to transmit records, bibliographic catalogs, and even manage collections. Employing the same principles that govern news aggregation methods in online media using the RSS format, a similar process is developed using the MARC-XML standard as the foundation for effective bibliographic redistribution and transmission among libraries. This method would allow for the simple and straightforward creation of collective catalogs without requiring more complex infrastructures such as Z39.50 servers.
Today, the thesis is fully published on the E-Prints portal of the Universidad Complutense and can be downloaded in PDF format (15MB). Notably, its statistics indicate that it has been downloaded over 1,000 times from 33 different countries, primarily the United States and Spain.
Reference
- Blázquez-Ochando, M. 2010. Applications of syndication for the management of bibliographic catalogs. Available at: http://eprints.ucm.es/11233/
Abstract
Content syndication constitutes the primary object of study around which the research on new applications for bibliographic catalog management is organized. From this perspective, evidence and experiments are provided regarding both the functioning of bibliographic syndication and the inherent properties and attributes determined by its format and methods of representation and retrieval. In relation to the sections addressed in the thesis, the following are distinguished: 1) Analysis of library services for bibliographic management, 2) The technological foundations of content syndication and its formats, 3) Definition, concept, and functioning of content syndication, 4) Development and experimentation of the SYNC and SYNCORE platforms. Among the most notable conclusions of this work is the evidence that content syndication can be configured as an alternative method to the Z39.50 protocol, which is more complex to implement, and to which must be added capabilities for retrieval, management, and editing of the bibliographic collection. Furthermore, the research provides results concerning the operational ranges of content syndication, the suitability of syndication formats, and the implementation of MARC-XML in real bibliographic collections, creating the first web service of its kind according to the specifications of the Library of Congress.