Re: who is the primary user?

Many thanks to Bill Drew for raising this issue, which is the first among today's thread to address the catalog-centric approach that seems to be the predominant theme of the discussions. To quote Karen Schneider's wonderful recent blog posting
entitled "The user is not broken" at http://freerangelibrarian.com/2006/06/the_user_is_not_broken_a_meme.php :

"The OPAC is not the sun. The OPAC is at best a distant planet, every year moving farther from the orbit of its solar system.

The user is the sun."

There have been a number of threads in other discussion venues recently that call into question the notion that we should invest a tremendous amount of time and energy into trying to "fix" or optimize our catalog interfaces, when in many instances
our users are viewing the catalog only as part of a greater whole and possibly, as Bill says, through a separate interface into which the OPAC is subsumed. When we founded the library here at California State University, Monterey Bay, eleven years
ago, we had already been labeled as the infamous "library without books" in a Newsweek article and elsewhere. However, two of our first decisions were to set up a contract with an approval vendor to start building a focused book collection and to
decide on an integrated library system. The fact that our focus was not on a large physical collection that would normally make the local catalog one of the most important finding aids to present to our users led us to design our initial website in
a way that embedded the catalog in the site without making it the default starting point for users. While we all certainly need to look at creative ways to enhance the usability and reach of our catalogs, I agree with Bill that we also need to be
looking at ways to build interfaces that encompass much of the content beyond our local collections, and that access to such content might best be implemented alongside our catalogs instead of through them as the primary user interface.

Steve Watkins
Coordinator of Technology Development
CSU Monterey Bay Library
steve_watkins_at_csumb.edu

Next generation catalogs for libraries <NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu> writes:
>But the data normally accessed via the catalog could simply be another data silo or source for a search interface of some kind.  It does not have to be accessed via a library "catalog" in a traditional sense.
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>Wilfred (Bill) Drew
>E-mail: [ mailto:drewwe_at_morrisville.edu ]mailto:drewwe_at_morrisville.edu
>AOL Instant Messenger:[ aim:goim?screenname=BillDrew4 ]BillDrew4
>
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