Whereas our current work is based on the analysis of national catalogues, our work is helping to challenge the nationalistic view of individual catalogues, and paves the way towards large-scale data integration. A number of key challenges remain to be overcome, however, regarding name disambiguation, varying languages, missing and duplicated information, biases in data collection, and the lack of custom data analysis methods. However, we have demonstrated that significant historical trends, such as the rate of change in language use or book sizes are often overwhelmingly clear and seen across multiple independently collected catalogues. Integrative analysis can thus help to verify the information and provide complementary views to the universally observed historical trends. Hence, our systematic approach provides a starting point, guidelines, and a set of practically tested algorithms for more extensive analysis and integration.
Mitä merkitystä tällä työllä ja näillä julkaisuilla suhteessa jo julkaistuihin on -- myös projektio koskien muita vastaavia katalogeja. Tämä arvokas osuus paperissa itsessään - Joo tätä pitäs avata vielä lisää / LLSystematic data harmonization, where the original raw entries are polished, disambiguated, mapped to controlled vocabularies, and verified by internal and external cross-checking of the correspondence between available data sources.