Linked Data, BIBFRAME, and search

This week's reading included several interesting articles on linked data and libraries, including this Library Journal blog post by Enis, this post by Owens, this post by O'Dell, and this article by Gonzales. All of these articles contained similar themes regarding the need to move away from the inflexible MARC format and toward something more amenable to web searching.  Some of the problems with current library catalogs include archaic search interfaces, record formats unfriendly to web-based and other "non-print" resources, and their invisibility to search engines.

The hope for BIBFRAME is that it would provide a way forward from MARC and allow library collections to be linked in intuitive and useful ways, so that authors, for example, might be linked not just to their works but perhaps also to members of their social group and events of the time and place where they lived. Perhaps a Google search would be able to easily connect potential users to the nearest available copies of a given book.

All of this is very exciting, and every indication is that this concept, or some aspect of it, will become a Real Thing in the next several years. However, I confess to a little skepticism as to how this will play out in actual practice.  For a shared catalog system, among libraries in a system, consortium, regional area, perhaps the world, this could solve a lot of "shared collection" needs.  Doing a Google search for something and getting a book from your local library in the top results would be pretty cool.

However, for general web searching, I worry about electronic resources and the issue of authentication and restricted, licensed access. Getting inaccessible results in a Google search quickly dilutes its usefulness, so how, then, does the search handle this?  Are the library's results pushed down in relevance or relegated to a "library" silo or special search (like Google Books, perhaps)? Does frustration with licensed access increase the push for Open Access?  Or will most of the licensed resources be sufficiently obscure that the main recipients of those results likely be academics with ways of attaining access? Google already includes some licensed content in its regular search results, with some ways of authenticating users by IP address (I believe it does this with Elsevier ScienceDirect content), but it doesn't yet do this on the scale proposed by BIBFRAME. It will be interesting follow this over the next several years!