I was just watching OCLC’s recent presentation on their Next Generation Metadata Management which includes an interesting overview (YouTube) by VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia, that coordinates the collection management and resource sharing of online resources in a consortial environment.
Managing the e-book metadata for the Austrian library consortium and also serving one library with DDA, I wish I had such a (relatively) unified system of record delivery that still allows you to make individual local settings for each library. Let me briefly describe my current workflow: For certain publishers or packages, we have agreements with German library networks that pre-process the metadata and offer it to other consortia who want to use it. Springer would be an example. But not all Springer packages are covered, so I also need to go to their portal, download records from there and customize them myself. In addition I have to set myself reminders each month for these tasks. The fact that we have these different sources of metadata means that different processing methods are involved for each of these sources – some elements (e.g. some shell scripts) are the same but on the whole there is no identical workflow for all the e-book metadata in our consortium.
A few years ago, there was talk that the German National Library would offer a central metadata pool for e-books for the German-speaking library community, but unfortunately that never panned out. What I find very attractive about OCLC’s system is that you get automatically notified of new, updated or deleted records and can distribute them widely while at the same time have local customizations.