"Too many subject lines." I hear ya.
Lately I've been thinking about library catalogs like this. In implementing
any product, there in an interplay between:
* the problem(s) I'm trying to solve in a given context (commercial,
education, public library, non-profit, to name a few).
* the ability of a given, usually commercial, product to solve those
problems.
* changing user needs (and it probably doesn't matter why they change.
Changing markets? Changing user preferences? Changing technology? All
three and more).
* the ability of vendor(s) to respond to change.
Lets face it: the basic, back-room tasks of libraries have not changed.
Circulation and inventory control are the same as always. Building a MARC
based catalog is not the black art it once was, though authority control
still seems magic to me. Acq shouldn't be hard but sometimes is; Acq
problems were a true trial in the INLEX/3000 product, but other vendors have
had their problems. Serials control really is quite a hard problem to
solve; just look at some of the data structures people have devised to track
serials.
Vendor, over time, had and have a wide variety of add-on products to meet
other needs, some pretty uncommon. Voice messaging, at least in the
INLEX/3000 product, was a true kludge.
The the Internet came along and, since 1994, the plans of both libraries and
their vendors have been well and truly jacked with. We've been reacting for
10 years to the agendas of others, and that is hard to take. This is part
of the reason why an aquaintance of mine says "Its pretty clear that
libraries, librarians and librarianship are channging. Its not clear what
they are changing in to."
Well, some among us (ELM is an GREAT example) have taken the initiative to
create innovative products (MyLibrary) to solve new problems. Other
projects like LibData, and the myriad of portal, imaging, archiving and
social computing projects - some based on commercial products, some FOSS -
are part of this outpouring of creativity. Heck, there are even folks
writing new ILS systems (Open ILS and the George PINES folks), which I find
audacious. Didn't we just spend 25 years developing local ILS's only to
scrap them?
In a larger sense, the 5 years I spent outside library and vendor land is
both unhelpful and helpful. Unhelpful: I worked for the vendors 9 years,
and 5 years in a library before that. I find it hard to wrap my head around
the array of new products created to meet new needs. Single/federated
search tools, link resolvers, library "portals" (an aside - are they portals
in the strict sense or the marketing sense?) - the whole thing gives me a
headache. That and keeping up with Amazon, Google, and Yahoo. And
Microsoft is not to be discounted. To say nothing of social computing
tools - blogs, wikis and things like FaceBook (which is already a source of
unending headaches for their users - I predict the killer app of the next 5
years will be a "FaceBook eraser" for use just before graduation and a job
search. Or marriage).
We can't keep up with every trend. We can't compete with transnational
companies. We can't meet every need. So it is very important we user our
skills as librarians, as well as acres of past research in user interface
design and indexing, to simply ask our users what they want, and when we're
lost to check our heads against:
* the problems we're trying to solve in our context
* ability of a product or product(s) to solve those problems
* changing user needs (which means we're looking for change constantly
and picking the subset of issues we can address)
* and the ability of vendors (commercial or "us" if we're rolling our own
systems) to respond to changing user needs and market trends.
I'll be writing about this further.
Mark Andrews, Systems Librarian
Creighton University, Omaha NE
mja30807_at_creighton.edu
mja30807_at_mac.com
Received on Sat Jun 10 2006 - 09:28:31 EDT