Integration of SKOS and SRU in a distributed collaboration environment for archival material description.

This poster describes the implementation of a solution based on the technical protocol SRU (Search/Retrieve URL) to search controlled vocabularies codified in SKOS. The application has been developed to access the engineering thesauri published by the Spanish Ministry of Civil Engineering
- Ministerio de Fomento. SRU is a technical protocol designed by the Library of Congress to access remote bibliographic databases; it is the result of an effort to adapt the Z39.50 protocol to the World Wide Web. In this contribution, the author proposes a profile SRU to access remote thesauri from different software applications used to complete and edit metadata. Cataloguers can search
these remote thesauri and assign descriptors to the records they create, regardless the metadata schema they are working with (EAD, MODS, MARCXML, etc.).
The proposed technical solution allows centres managing thesauri to expose and share their controlled vocabularies worldwide. This gives more visibility to these controlled vocabularies, and other libraries and archives may access them and benefit from the reuse of already-developed thesauri. The author considers that the capability of reusing these thesauri across a wide community of users is a key factor to demonstrate and justify the cost of the controlled vocabularies’ development and maintenance.