Future Internet_**2013**, \(5\), 429-438; doi:10.3390/fi5030429  
_future internet_  
ISSN 1999-5903  
www.mdpi.com/journal/futureinternet  
_Article_  
Libraries' Role in Curating and Exposing Big Data  
[PERSON] 1 and [PERSON] 2-*  
Footnote 1: [[https://www.mdpi.com/journals/](https://www.mdpi.com/journals/)]([https://www.mdpi.com/journals/](https://www.mdpi.com/journals/))  
300 million records of physical and electronic books and journals, recordings, movies, maps and scores with more than 2 billion holdings that describe which libraries, archives and museums hold and license these resources. However, these 300 million individual records remain isolated in the Web, requiring a restructuring of how this data is exposed for use throughout the Web. The organizing of information has been carried out for centuries. \"The idea that a library should provide the opportunity for study of the texts and a means to discover the original words of the authors, even those who had lived long before, first became the manifest of the library of Alexandria.... In the middle of the third century BC, [PERSON] the poet, was employed here. Organizing the material and carrying on scholarly work at the same time.... [PERSON] so-called _Pinakes_, in which the works of the authors were organized in alphabetical order, was the first ever library catalogue.\" [1]  
This work advanced over the next thousand years with small improvements on how these lists were maintained, but they were intended only as inventory devices rather than finding aids. It wasn't until the seventeenth century that printed book catalogs were introduced at Oxford and began to have alphabetical arrangements of authors to serve as finding aids [2]. The end of the nineteenth century saw the introduction of printed cards and the card catalog [3]. This was the dominant library finding aid for the next century until the first commercially available Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) was introduced in 1980 by CLSI in the United States [4]. However, as [PERSON] points out in his work, _Everything Is Miscellaneous_, these catalogs were organized for an analog world [5]. Somebody had to decide how to organize the information, whether it be alphabetical by author or title, or using a subject thesaurus or classification scheme, which predetermined how materials would be organized and then located. For the most part these were closed schemas disallowing reuse of parts of the metadata in other systems. There were exceptions, such as authority files of authors' names, which could then be linked to multiple cataloging records, but even then there was no common schema for linking to these files to open them up for broader use. So the question raised by OCLC Research and OCLC's Innovation Lab is whether this metadata about library materials has a role in the current world of cloud computing and big data, and if so, how is that role defined and who fills it? [PERSON] defines big data as \"high-volume, velocity and/or variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing that enable enhanced insight, decision-making and process automation.\" [6] This ties to [PERSON]'s concept of the Web as leaves that can be made smart and piled together to meet any specific users need. He states \"Smart leaves are not like catalog cards with more room and an extra forth IQ points.... An identifier such as an ISBN that enables distributed information to come together when needed turns a C-student leaf into a genius.\" [7]  
We are often asked, \"Is library data really big data?\" If you consider just the metadata representing the collection of printed and electronic works held by libraries, it really cannot be considered big data in its current meaning. [8] Even when you consider the full-text of those works, the data management does not require \"big data\" techniques. However, when we look at these collections as a training set for all human knowledge, we can follow obvious data trails to generate massive collections of new relationship assertions.