Hi all,
I've been listening to the various threads over the last few days, and was just pondering that the next gen is all about the web being people centric rather than content centric.
And it seems to me that most of the discussion on the list I have seen recently is still about the collection, and just finding new and better ways for people to come to us, or take info from us, and search/browse/ find/link etc.
And that set me to wondering if that is actually a new gen, or just a prettier, more flexible version of the old gen. If we are actually searching for a new gen, ie people centric, version of a catalogue, is it a catalogue at all? After all, isn't a catalogue a listing (in some guise) of what we have, or have access to? So is there some merit in letting go of the notion of catalogue as we traditionally think of it, and thinking about how the world might look if we start with the premise that the user wants to access some information for a specific purpose (I'm considering our academic library here), and they don't care where it is, who owns it, whether it is in a catalogue at all...etc?
What if this new generation ( who get low self esteem if they don't get regular messages on their mobiles) come from a completely different premise, and that is that the most important element of a book is what social interaction it can bring them? So their assessment of it is how well it will enable them to contribute to the group discussion, and "buy" them credibility with their peers in the class? So their review of it is critical, and of significant interest to others?
Which is why I think LibraryThing is exciting, and pushing the boundaries in ways that I suspect we need to go - into the domain where the social need is paramount, and the control is in the hands of the users. What if our "catalogue" is nothing more than a venue to enable people to meet over a book (or other piece of information)? Or rather, what if our catalogue is nothing more than a data source which feeds the user's catalogue, and their own personal catalogue is the only thing that matters to them? And all they care about is if our catalogue is built on standards that allows their personal catalogue to pull out of it what they want? So does our catalogue then provide for multitudes of personal catalogues, or do we simply provide a backend for future LibraryThings? A postgraduate student told me only today that he searches catalogues using Endnote, and then takes a list from Endnote with him to the remote library to get the books he wanted. He never uses the OPAC, becaus!
e he has more control using Endnote, and ends up with all his references together (his own "catalogue").
A few years ago my kids taught me to use chat, and one day as I was meeting people from across the globe, the wonder of the shift in power that that very simple little tool enabled dawned on me. I no longer needed to rely on the media, libraries, governments and other traditional controllers of information to find out what was going on - I just needed to find someone to talk to online and I could find out myself, and be my own newshound, in the ways that interested me. I found out about 9/11 because someone in NY shouted online - OHMYGOD, THEY JUST HIT THE WTC, seconds after the first plane hit - it was 10 minutes before our local TV stations on the other side of the world caught up. If I extrapolate from that experience into the rest of the information world, and a lot of years further on with people who grow up expecting this connectivity and expect to control their own information, what does it look like?
I know I am not expressing anything clearly, but I am trying to imagine how this world might be, and even what it already is, and where our role in it might be....and I suspect that until we address these sorts of questions (and the multitude that I haven't even thought of) the discussion about how we do or do not index our catalogue, and if we use subject headings, might be all just a bit too late....
My late night ponderings...
Regards
Carolyn McDonald
Library
Edith Cowan University
Western Australia
Received on Mon Jun 26 2006 - 10:57:41 EDT