The (draft) Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control includes
the following section, [1] and while the section speaks to the needs/
desires of users, its recommendations speak to the future of library
catalogs. As such it is perfectly apropos for this list.
The section is yet another vision/articulation of how library
catalogs should function in the future. Any library automation vendor
or open source software community could use it as a blueprint for
development. If we assume this to be true, then what are the next
steps in the creation of one or more of these systems?
The section is quoted in full in order to "save the time of the reader":
4.1 Design for Today's and Tomorrow's User
The metadata created by libraries' bibliographic control activities
serve multiple types of users. These include the customers of our
libraries and of our catalogs, other libraries, and the library
service industry. "Users" are not only people, but the systems and
software that interact with metadata to provide services. Metadata
are used within both a consumer environment and a management
environment. Each of these groups and uses poses somewhat different
requirements.
Users of library materials are diverse, and a single individual will
exhibit different needs, expectations, and behaviors as the purpose
of his/her research changes. There is no "typical user." Library
users can vary widely in their knowledge both of library systems and
of the subject domains they are investigating. Studies indicate that
over three-quarters of users have low knowledge of how to use the
library catalog as well as low subject knowledge of their immediate
topic of interest. By contrast, less than 1% of users have high
skills in both using the catalog and subject domain knowledge. This
disparity in user skills and needs makes it difficult for libraries
to focus their bibliographic control efforts.
Users are making new demands on metadata. Thanks to the ubiquity and
utility of Web search engines, in combination with rapid innovations
in Web technology, most users now conduct their research in multiple
discovery environments: search engines, online booksellers, course
management systems, specialized databases, library catalogs, and
more. They prefer to have simultaneous access to information in many
physical and digital formats, beyond traditional print.
A significant change in the searching behavior of library users has
occurred in the past decade, with users often bypassing library
catalogs and going first to search engines and other Internet
resources. The content of these discovery systems (including those
managed by libraries) is becoming more blended and diverse; materials
formerly managed through separate standards and practices (such as
articles, archives, and images) are now being mixed in both general
and domain-specific systems.
As experienced users of Internet search engines, library users expect
increased capabilities in our online systems. They value features and
data that help them make sense of results by ranking, organizing, and
clustering. Library catalogs have consciously presented a neutral and
authoritative view of the bibliographic universe. Evaluative
information, such as reviews and reading lists, has not traditionally
been part of the library catalog (although they have of course long
been part and parcel of "the compleat reference department"). Today,
bibliographic Web sites like Amazon.com and LibraryThing provide
users with information about resources, as well as information that
help them evaluate those resources. They also allow users to share
reading lists, add reviews and ratings, and supply their own subject
tags. Both Amazon and LibraryThing embody a combination of
bibliographic and social networking systems. LibraryThing, in fact,
is largely based on library-produced data. Library systems are
responding to changes in user expectations with new collocation and
display methods, including clustering all versions of a work, and
faceting retrieved results sets by subject, format, classification,
and language. Few library systems, however, currently allow users to
add or manipulate catalog data.
Libraries have tended to equate bibliographic control with the
production of metadata for use solely within the library catalog.
This narrow focus is no longer suitable in an environment wherein
data from diverse sources are used to create new and interesting
information views. Library data must be usable outside of the
catalog, and the catalog must be able to ingest or interact with
records from sources outside of the library cataloging workflow. The
tightly controlled consistency designed into library standards thus
far is unlikely to be realized or sustained in the future, even
within the local environment.
Any given library will, of necessity, serve users with different
levels of sophistication in library use and in subject knowledge. The
challenge to libraries, then, is to produce metadata that will serve
this broad range of users well. Many libraries have chosen to produce
metadata to satisfy the needs of their most sophisticated users,
despite the fact that such users are but a small percentage of their
total user base. They do so on the increasingly dubious assumption
that all users will benefit from the greatest detail in cataloging.
Consequences of Maintaining the Status Quo
Library users will continue to bypass catalogs in favor of search
engines. Some studies have found that over three quarters of library
users start with a search engine and not the online catalog.24
The resources needed to catalog at a sophisticated level are
increasingly difficult to sustain. Libraries face a trade-off between
doing detailed cataloging for regularly published materials, and
doing less-detailed cataloging for a wider variety of information types.
Recommendations
4.1.1 Link Appropriate External Information with Library Catalogs
4.1.1.1 All: Encourage and support development of systems capable of
relating evaluative data, such as reviews and ratings, to
bibliographic records.
4.1.1.2 All: Encourage the enhancement of library systems to provide
the capability to link to appropriate user-added data available via
the Internet (e.g., Amazon.com, LibraryThing, and Wikipedia).
4.1.2 Integrate User-Contributed Data into Library Catalogs
4.1.2.1 All: Develop library systems that can accept user input and
other non- library data without interfering with the integrity of
library-created data.
4.1.2.2 All: Investigate methods of categorizing creators of added
data to allow informed use of user-contributed data without violating
the privacy obligations of libraries.
4.1.2.3 All: Develop methods to guide user tagging through techniques
that suggest entry vocabulary (e.g., term completion, tag clouds).
4.1.3 Research Use of Computationally Derived Evaluation
4.1.3.1 All: Make use of holdings and circulation information to
point users to items that are most used and that may potentially be
of most interest.
4.1.3.2 All: Compare user tags with controlled vocabularies and
identify correlations between them.
Desired Outcomes
Library bibliographic data will be used in a wide variety of
environments, and interoperability between library and non-library
bibliographic applications will increase/improve.
Library catalogs are seen as valuable components in an interlocking
array of discovery tools.
Library resource discovery and evaluation will be enhanced by
contributions from users.
[1] http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-report-
draft-11-30-07-final.pdf
--
Eric Lease Morgan
Head, Digital Access and Information Architecture Department
University Libraries of Notre Dame
(574) 631-8604
Received on Tue Dec 11 2007 - 12:54:50 EST