On 4/27/07, Eric Lease Morgan <emorgan_at_nd.edu> wrote:
> On Apr 27, 2007, at 3:51 PM, Drew, Bill wrote:
>
> > To me it sounds like what we are really talking about is a federated
> > search interface, not a catalog at all!
>
To clarify, I didn't mean federated search. I meant the "black-box"
of info seeking & retrieval, call it a catalog, call it what-have-you,
is going to be different for different contexts of use. When I
originally wrote it, I meant that it would be different for different
people and different contexts, but, after over a decade in academic
libraries, I can see Art's point that the 3rd grader and the scholarly
researcher are sometimes indeed indistinguishable (grin). So I'll
just leave it at different contexts.
> IMHO, the thing we are discussing should evolve beyond a catalog
> because in this day and age of networked information the issue is
> less about what a library owns.
Right. It's more about your personal affiliation(s). What does one
have the right to use?
> .. It is discover, re-discover,
> use, compare & contrast, evaluate, review, edit, supplement, share,
> print, save, delete, update, find more like this one, suggest, tag,
> blog, organize, remember, remind, annotate, outline, collaborate.
I can conceive of a world where everybody gets their own custom tool,
or suite of tools to do the tasks Eric lists. Then it's not only a
question of exposing the metadata (and digital object content itself)
to the users but making the building blocks to create the best
personal tools. The building blocks must interoperate. That means
tool builders need to share a common mental model of the information
environment. Frameworks, such as the one put forth by
Coyle/Hillman/Weiss, are key.
Even if various nextgen catalog builders can agree to a common
framework, there is still the issue that end-user mental models don't
match those of information professionals designing the frameworks.
Ultimately, all my blathering on this topic is to champion the idea
that those people we serve should be front and center in our design
process. That's tricky. How many customers want to be involved in
the creation of their own tools? It's also tricky because there is no
one-size-fits-all context. I think we need to accept that we're not
going to be able to build one, ultimate, nextgen library catalog.
> I see this "next generation" thing more akin to a tool -- one of many
> -- for making it easier for the users of libraries to do their work.
> In an academic library this "next generation" thing will be one of
> the systems helping students to learn, instructors to teach, and
> scholars to do research. It is a thing that embodies the whole of
> librarianship in a networked environment.
>
Interesting. Still musing here -- maybe we need to call the nextgen
tool "the Digital Librarian." Only if it's a killer app, however. I
wouldn't want to squander the good reputation of Librarians (grin).
Your comment that the nextgen thing embodies the whole of
librarianship brings up a question I've been pondering of late: out
of a century or so of modern librarianship, what are the big
principles/core concepts that we've learned about information
seeking/use that we can apply to the networked information
environment? For example, we know from experience the phenomena of
inter and intra-indexer inconsistency in applying subject terms (what
Furnas called "the vocabulary problem"). We also know that
information distribution on a given topic statistically tends to run
in Bradford distributions.
Perhaps a deeper analysis of the theory of LIS and what we already
know can inform optimal design of nextgen black-box. In the case of
Bradford distributions, you could design a nextgen catalog for the
scholarly context which mines the outliers of the Bradford areas since
researchers need to know everything which has already been written on
a topic. You could design a nextgen catalog for the undergraduate
which focuses on the core Bradford area where the biggest proportion
of relevent items are to be found. You could design a nextgen
catalog for the interested layperson at the public library which took
only the top couple of articles from the Bradford core. etc. etc.
I'm probably not explaining the Bradford thing too well, but I
recommend Marcia Bates work
http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/articles/Searching_Bradford-m020430.html
if you're interested.
So, what do you folks think are the big things we've learned since the
days of Dewey? Or conversely, what are the grand challenges in LIS?
How do those lessons inform the nextgen catalog?
Laura
Received on Tue May 01 2007 - 12:03:43 EDT