Herbert van de Sompel, recently interviewed for the ATG Podcast, describes himself, somewhat modestly, as an “infrastructure plumber” rather than a librarian. Putting it more accurately, he explains “Over the past 25, 30 years, I’ve done a lot of basic infrastructure work to allow technology to be used to improve research communication.” By that, he means, among other things, the creation of the OAI-PMH Protocol (along with Paul Ginsparg and Rick Luce). This protocol, if you aren’t familiar with it, is the most widely used way for exchanging content and metadata to and from repositories, in use for over 20 years. Van de Sompel was a pioneer of library automation, initially understood as catalogue automation, but which evolved into the highly linked environment of library catalogues today. In the early days, they used CD-ROMs, with the problem that different databases were not interlinked. Today, we take for granted that different resources are shared and interoperable, as well as solving the “appropriate copy problem” – if you are a member of an institution, you want to be linked to the full text of an article if the library has access to it, not to a firewalled version. This led to the OpenURL framework, still in use today.
But, as Van de Sompel makes clear, there is much more that can be done: he still has visions of what libraries could achieve. “libraries can think of other services, creative things to do, point from one part of a collection to another part, et cetera. They are, you know, creative with that regard. They know their own collections very well”. Hear more about Herbert van de Sompel’s vision for library practice in the full interview.
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