After a few weeks of this mailing list, I think I see "sum" trends or
items of consensus, and they echo much of what Karen S. mentioned
previously:
* There seems to be a consensus the "next generation" library catalog
needs to contain things that go beyond the things owned or licensed
by a library. For example, in an academic library it might very well
contain articles from scholarly journals or items harvested from the
'Net. (If this is true, then the term "catalog" may be mis-leading.)
* There seems to be a consensus the "catalog" needs to include
services beyond find and identify. Some of these services might
include review, annotate, download, manage citation, tag, facilitate
social networking, etc. In this way the "catalog" becomes more of a
tool as much as a searchable list.
* There is not a consensus whether or not this "catalog" is
technically one index (with many interfaces) or many indexes glued
together through metasearch.
* In order to meet user's expectations, at least one of the
searchable interfaces to this thing needs to be as simple as as
Google's interface. One box. One button. Relevancy ranked output.
* This thing has many interfaces, and these interfaces need to be a
part of the user's total Web experience; there are many Web pages,
RSS feeds, "my" pages, toolbars, etc. interfaces to this thing.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
University Libraries of Notre Dame
Received on Wed Jun 28 2006 - 14:21:07 EDT