First, thanks to Eric Lease Morgan for starting this list. Even the
digest form is eating up a lot of time, I would have cancelled by now if
it weren't touching on so many issues that my library is facing.
Second, because I'm reading the digested form, I'm responding to a
number of different people at once. If anyone thinks this is
inappropriate, please let me know...it just saves time to copy out
sections of different things I want to respond to and then send it all
at once. But if it's not working for the list, I don't want to do it
that way.
>The Internet and associated search engines have the world into
"meatball searchers"(remember the line from M.A.S.H. about "meatball
surgery," which was just barely good enough to keep body and soul
together to get somebody to a real hospital? That's what I mean).
<me>But meatball surgery might have been the best way to do things when
you had a whole roomful of people who urgently needed care to save their
lives. Very few of the searchers we're talking about are going to die
from a failed or poor search, but their sense of urgency often drives
them to want "whatever I can get right now, in the next 10-30 minutes."
I don't think we can totally discount these searchers.
But, on the other hand, is there a feasible balance that can be struck
between simple catalog searching that lets the meatballers get in and
out, and sophisticated searching that does all of the things that
sophisticated users expect, need and want?</me>
>"[any] change [or new technology] is good"
<me>Is this really often repeated? Who says this? Who thinks this?
Anyone? I'm the only geek in my library and my favorite joke when
something goes wrong with technology (pretty near every day) is that
it's a sign of "continuous progress."</me>
>Hmm . . . I think--and this is just a rough sense, from a very green =
librarian--that there are a number of people in the library world who =
don't feel they can be that demanding of their vendors. I get the sense
from some people that we simply have to rely on vendors, because we
aren't capable of doing the things they do, because we lack the skills,
or the time, or what have you.
<me>I'm pretty green myself, and I feel the same way. I think it's
actually sort of an economic thing. The market for ILS's is
comparatively very small. The inertia you need to overcome to seriously
undertake changing ILS's seems overwhelming in my short experience. The
enhancement requests that seem to be most popular are minor changes that
will fix something that really annoys some staff member (although, often
the staff are most annoyed when they have to tell a patron that
something perfectly reasonable can't be done because the system won't do
it).
The fix to the economic part of it is to vote with your feet and support
only those systems that are customizable enough to do what you want, now
and maybe even tomorrow. Or is there another fix that I'm not thinking
of? Could the ALA step in and make some suggestions that all vendors
ought to follow...maybe a sort of meta-enhancement request that could be
issued to all ILS's? And how do we overcome the inertia that keeps us
tied to systems that aren't meeting our needs or just plain "suck?"</me>
Joe Montibello
Library Systems Coordinator / Reference Librarian
Class of 1945 Library
Phillips Exeter Academy
Received on Fri Jun 16 2006 - 11:35:00 EDT