I suppose part of the problem is that there a lot of people who have
spent a lot of time developing MARC with end-users in mind, only to be
stymied by end user systems that have never used MARC to its fullest
advantage. This is seen as a failure of MARC when it is, in fact an
evolution of the catalog. Early catalogs emulated card catalogs, then
"second generation" catalogs came along and gave us keyword searching
and the beginnings of customization by the library. Next there was a
lot of discussion of end-user customization (a la My Yahoo! and similar
services) but that did not give patrons what they wanted.
So ... what is it patrons want? They want Lt. Uhura. They want to tell
the computer what they want and they expect it to spit it out. NOW plz.
No matter what they actually tell it. No matter whether the library has
it or not. Anything less is deemed failure.
So ... who has ideas on how we can succeed? If you see Sigourney
Weaver, tell her I am waiting for her to translate the user's needs for
the computer. [If you have not seen galaxy Quest, a spoof of Star Trek,
I apologize].
Hank Young (yes, Naomi and I are related)
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Drew, Bill
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 4:33 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Death by enhancement: was WorldCat Local
There is no need for the front end seen by the end-user to be the same
as the "catalog" used internally to manage the library inventory. The
library's MARC records are simply another silo of information. The
problem is may librarians and libraries do not see it that way.
Bill Drew
Received on Thu Apr 26 2007 - 15:07:25 EDT