For or the future of library networks in Germany the Wissenschaftsrat (German Research Council) recommended a significant redesign of the existing infrastructures. To promote the necessary developments the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation) launched a funding program for the reorganization of information services in October 2012. Under the issue “Library data infrastructure and local systems” the library consortia of Hesse (HeBIS), Bavaria (BVB), and Berlin-Brandenburg (KOBV) applied successfully for the project “Cloud-based Infrastructure for Library Data” (CIB).
CIB is going to develop an infrastructure model that will enable the primary cataloging in international cataloging environments. These environments are actually on the one hand the WMS system provided by OCLC (with WorldCat as the global catalogue data base), and on the other hand the ALMA system of Ex Libris. One of the major goals of the CIB-Project is to synchronize the bibliographic metadata, which are produced in both systems. Facing the market of system providers the synchronization will be developed for ALMA and WMS first. But the synchronization processes will be open for future solutions of new and other system providers as well. The aim is to create a uniform German data space, which contains the metadata of German libraries including authority data and the ZDB.
