>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_ .
Or for that matter, the information seeking patterns of the academic
researcher and the 3rd grader with a science project may occasionally be
indistinguishable. Tim's original message on the "spiderable" catalogue
suggests an approach that is worth emphasizing, the catalogue can exist in
multiple forms. There are times when a snappy googlish interface may be
the cat's meow for retrieval, and Ryan Eby has a great post [1] on the
number of tantalizing solr projects going on right now in the library
community that take advantage of facets. This experimentation may lead to
several options that could easily coexist with others. I seem to remember
that it was a computer science student at the University of Waterloo that
gave the world the first creation called a "webcat" in the early days of
the web and some interesting things might come from non-library sources if
the underlying data can be made more malleable for others. And what about
the catalogue as an agenda for digitization? I am all for improved
metadata but surely part of the "next generation" equation is getting the
objects themselves into the mix.
art
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1. http://blog.ryaneby.com/archives/solr-in-libraries/
Received on Sun Apr 29 2007 - 19:43:58 EDT