Ron Peterson writes:
>My concern whenever I see people talking about "what the
>patrons really wants" is how do we know what the patron REALLY
>wants.
A very valid concern, Ron. It is truly not possible for myself, as a
cataloger, to anticipate how users will want to access the materials I
put in our database even if I were granted the most intuitive and
flexible of vocabularies, was not hampered by senseless rules/rule
interpretations that work to limit how much access catalogers create,
did not have to spend much of my cataloging time correcting errors and
deficiencies in the copy cataloging record that dozens, if not hundreds,
of catalogers had already corrected when they acquired the same record,
had unlimited time to catalog, and was as expertly knowledgeable on all
of the subjects that are in the works I catalog as some of users who may
utilize the materials may be.
Impossible - truly. No amount of user studies (which I support
wholeheartedly) will ever completely overcome this.
But I do believe that the new paradigm of information sharing/access
represented by tagging and other social networking tools can help to
these shortcomings because users *do* know how they perceive and seek
and categorize resources that are useful to them. Researchers, authors,
and subject specialists know the most current and most arcane of
terminologies in their field, children know the words that are in their
range of knowledge, reference librarians know how users ask for
materials (and then must find a way to translate this into the narrow
range of choices OPACS generally offer), and general users plug in words
they know into our keyword fields hoping they will be successful, etc.
Tagging, reviews, linked user lists, and the like are a part of the
answer. There will be more paradigm shifts in the future but I firmly
believe that, for now, the idea that relying solely on either catalogers
or on system algorithms miss the strengths of an emerging paradigm with
a great deal of value that is largely absent in "LibraryLand." Let's
facilitate the user participating in access alongside cataloging skills
and systems design!
Allen Mullen
Eugene Public Library
Received on Fri Apr 27 2007 - 11:45:07 EDT