Timeline
Timeline of Library Technologies
Jeremy Nelson, Software Engineer
Wednesday, August 8th 2018
Timeline of Library Technologies
First developmend on 1960s mainframes, the MARC record specification allowed libraries to encode their collections and share with other libraries and library consortiums. MARC-based enterprise software for cataloging, sharing, tracking became known as Intergrated Library Systems or ILS.
In the early 1990s, Sir Tim Berners-Lee new World Wide Web (WWW) began explosive growth tranjectory that ended with current information environment we live with today. Libraries and Library Technology Vendors inititally released web interfaces for their ILS called OPACs.
After 2000, the library open source communities began releasing newer front-end Discovery interfaces for library collections including digital object management in insitutional repositories.
Starting in 2001, the technologies for representing web resources as machine actionable metadata called Resource Description Framework (RDF) has been adopted by the library community to represent bibliographic data collectively known as Linked Data. BIBFRAME is a RDF vocabulary for replacing MARC.