Thanks Karen for bringing that up. I was just about to do it myself,
in fact I added "user" to http://futurelib.pbwiki.com/People just this
morning because the absence of our customers was glaring. If we don't
serve the people we purport to serve, we shall find our funding drying
up as other entities move to fill in the gap. The difficulty is that
our users are not all the same, nor are their contexts of use -- the
"all things to all people" problem. What works for the academic
researcher isn't going to be the catalog that works for the 3rd grader
with a science project. Perhaps its time to think not of the next-gen
catalog but next gen catalog_s_ .
Laura
On 4/27/07, K.G. Schneider <kgs_at_bluehighways.com> wrote:
> > Hear, hear! I agree. Everybody has something to contribute. It is not
> > all about cataloging. It is not all about programming. It is not all
> > about information literacy. It is not all about services. It is not
> > all about collections. It is not an either/or. Instead it is a both/
> > and. We all have more in common than differences. Build on
> > everybody's strengths.
> >
> > --
> > Eric Lease Morgan
> > University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
> My one caution with the arguments I've seen so far is that they work forward
> from ILS/catalog/MARC, rather than backward from the user. We seem to be
> trying to justify our tools and legacy data rather than asking what people
> need.
>
> Karen G. Schneider
> kgs_at_bluehighways.com
>
Received on Fri Apr 27 2007 - 13:23:12 EDT