The CARL system, which I think was picked up by The Library Corporation,
had a very simple user interface for the public. In fact it presaged
Google.
The character-mode interface offered users a choice of "words" or
"names" - that's it. Enter words, get bibs and holdings. Enter names,
get a list of names. Pick a name, get a list of bibs and holdings.
Rather than have a flexible user interface, CARL stripped away detail to
the point where you didn't need complexity or flexibility. Whey they
appeared to want was a catalog anybody could use without explanation.
There were a million things I hated about that catalog as a librarian.
As a user I loved it.
M. Andrews
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Roger Fenton
Sent: Monday, June 26, 2006 9:00 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Are "good enough" standards ok?
Our own studies at the National Library of Wales, on Geac, VTLS, TLC and
AquaBrowser OPACs (not just ours, but some other libraries') showed that
our users (a) assume automatically that any search they do is a KW
search, even if the text-entry box is labelled "browse", and (b) simply
don't understand the concept of browsing as applied to a library
catalogue. To them, browsing a catalogue is like browsing in a clothing
shop: they don't expect headings as a result of a browse search, they
expect individual catalogue records, like shirts on a rack, and when a
browse search throws up a list of headings they are simply flummoxed. It
takes a deal of explaining to them to get them to understand what *we*
mean by the term.
To my mind, anything that needs that kind of explaining doesn't belong
at the top table of an OPAC designed for the public. By all means
include a browse function, but don't stick it where unwarry ordinary
patrons can get at it by mistake. Maybe things are different in other
countries, and our own staff certainly do want to have access to a
browse capability, but we've decided to 'hide' the browse function of
our new OPAC away from its front page, out of harm's way.
A second objection I have to browsing may not apply to all libraries,
but when browsing "Doe, John" throws up 30 or more different author
headings for him, many of them not author-title headings but simply
variants of the author heading differentiated solely by punctuation,
extra spaces, inclusion or not of middle initials, or different ways of
displaying birth and death dates, caused by the vagaries of cataloguing
rules changes over many decades as well as rogue cataloguer
inconsistencies, and these headings each have to be searched
individually (i.e., there's no way of ticking off all the relevant ones
and then combining them in a single merged display of individual
catalogue records), it's a near-criminal waste of users' time. I know
this isn't a problem with the principle of browse searching, but it sure
is a problem of one-the-ground browsing.
Roger Fenton
Jane Myers wrote:
Received on Mon Jun 26 2006 - 10:16:24 EDT