Paul Stainthorp Schrödinger's cataloguer

“Item pages sport COinS metadata“, we blithely announced earlier this week. In reality this is a great leap in the right direction for Jerome. It’s a perfect example of one of the ways we’re processing and [re-]presenting the bibliographic data that Jerome sucks in, making it machine readable via a really cool web interface, and enhancing the end-user experience as a result.

COinS, in case you’re suffering from Friday Afternoon Acronym Desensitivity Syndrome (FAADS), stands for “Context Objects in Spans“, don’tchaknow. It’s a way of embedding bibliographic metadata about a resource—often the data needed to meet the OpenURL standard—directly into the HTML tags of a web page about that same resource.

Give it a go with your favourite bibliographic reference management software. I used Zotero to grab the details of a random book record in Jerome:

And compared it to how Zotero handles the same book record presented in the University of Lincoln’s native library catalogue (SirsiDynix HiP). See the table below. HiP actually works very well with Zotero (I don’t think it uses COinS, though), capturing 14 of 17 potentially useful data fields. Jerome is less impressive (alpha release, remember!) at the moment, capturing 8 of the same 17. But it’s a bloody good start, contains all of the essential referenceable fields, and you’ll be able to watch the score even out as Jerome’s record enrichment kicks in, and as we tweak the site.