Eric,
To me the question is not "what's in it?" but "what does it connect to?"
and "what are it's services?" The library will have some kind of
inventory of holdings, but that's the management view (we have to manage
our inventory). In the user view, I think the library "catalog" should
disappear into the Net and become part of the whole world of
information. The users may not even know that a catalog, as such,
exists. The library will become an information community that provides
services. Some of those services will be based around resources that the
library owns and licenses, some will be based around publicly available
resources on the open network. (OK, assuming that we still have an open
network in the future, but let's pretend that we will.)
What might this look like? Well, we have a certain amount of it today. A
user does a basic search on a search engine. Among the items that are
retrieved are openly available articles, and articles for which the open
web only has the metadata. However, because the user is part of a
library community, he is notified of articles that are available to him
through this community. He also sees which ones are available for
purchase. He may never "go to" a library catalog, because the library
serves it all up through web services. The catalog itself, if it exists,
is a small subset of the total information universe.
I can also imagine that a user within an institution (university,
corporation) may have an institutional view of information that is
specifically geared to that community, such as being able to see what
items are currently being used in the classroom, or to see confidential
corporate information sources. I suspect that the institutional view and
the view that we think of as the public library view will be different,
mainly because the public library needs to serve a wide range of
interests. I think it will be harder to create a service-based "catalog"
in the public library arena because of this. I don't have a sense of how
public libraries or small libraries of any kind will be able to function
in this view. My dream would be that state libraries become the virtual
libraries for all citizens of the state, because they might be large
enough to be visible in the greater information space.
kc
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> What is in this "next generation" library catalog thing?
>
> We've discussed a lot about whether nor not this thing should be open
> source or not. We've discussed whether or not it should provide this
> interface, that interface, or the other interface. We've discussed
> how content might be marked up in MARC, some flavor of XML, or just
> stored in a database. We've discussed whether or not it should
> exploit Z39.50, SRW/U, and/or OpenSearch.
>
> But hey, what's the content in this thing? To what degree is the
> content of this thing the entire Internet? Just the things a library
> owns/licenses? Or maybe something in between? The answer to this
> question will provide a scope for the "next generation" library catalog.
>
> What characterizes the content of this "thing"? What sorts of
> collection policies might govern this things scope?
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
> (574) 631-8604
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
Received on Sat Mar 17 2007 - 11:12:40 EDT