On Jul 31, 2007, at 10:33 AM, Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> We are not in direct competition with the "world at large", it is
> rather the stuff we have on offer that makes the biggest difference...
>
> Success, however, depends a lot on the search interface and what
> use it
> makes of the metadata, how consistent it is, and how well it is
> presented...
I don't necessarily agree. There is a lot of competition, and in
general the world thinks library searching is difficult and arcane.
Furthermore, the stuff we have to offer is minimal. True, libraries
have a lot of content, we license a lot of content as well, but this
content is not described very well in our indexes. The content is
meager. A title. A note that says, "Includes index." and a number of
controlled vocabulary terms that to not relate to people's way of
thinking. What is required is digitizing of content and full-text
indexing. Moreover, libraries are not about books. They are about
data, information, and knowledge. Books are just some of the
containers of such things. Even more, the problem is not about search
interfaces. The problems revolving around indexes and ways to search
them have been solved by the IR community for about a decade. The
problems now revolve around what we do with search results.
The ideas behind "next generation" library catalogs have little to do
with cataloging and more to do with services provided against content
in our collections.
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Tue Jul 31 2007 - 09:01:19 EDT