B.G. Sloan wrote:
> Upon further reflection, I have to admit that that's also pretty much how I use the library catalog these days. And I was a librarian for 35 years. Sure, I'll occasionally do some keyword searching on the catalog, but by and large I've developed information-seeking behavior that requires minimal use of the library's catalog. I wasn't always like this...I used to use the catalog extensively. But my behavior evolved as increasingly more information-seeking resources becam
I would suggest that's because those other information resources have
surpassed the catalog in their quality and ease of use and ability to
help you (and most people). Catalog used to be the best thing around
for those tasks, not even close anymore.
So we have a question:
1) Can we improve our catalogs so they actually do provide a useful
discovery service, supplementing the other services out there in useful
ways for certain classes of discovery tasks, and being very easy to use
and integrate into a search process involving those other things too? (I
would have no desire to somehow make our catalog _replace_ those other
things for our userse. It's a pointless goal, even if it were
attainable. That's right off the table. Supplement is the question).
How do we do that, if we should do that?
2) Or instead should we relinquish the idea that the catalog should help
with discovery in the first place? Use other things (free on the web?
Licensed resources?) to find what you want, the catalog is just going to
be used in the future to find known items, the end. Doing that would
certainly allow us to _significantly_ reduce cataloging time -- there's
really no purpose to subject heading assignment in such a scenario, is
there? But doing so also means putting our patron's fate in the hands
of organizations we have no control over. If our patrons want to find
books and other materials on their research topic, we just send them out
into the free web, and hope it works? It's a bit scary.
My prejudice is toward #1, but I'm not sure if that's a rational
decision, or just because I personally actually _like_ the catalog (it's
potential if it's not it's actuality), and don't want to give up on it.
Jonathan
> I'm not saying that libraries are superfluous...I'm a big library supporter. I guess I'm saying that library catalogs have failed to evolve much over the years. Online catalogs were first developed back when libraries were still pretty much the only game in town (or on campus) when it came to information access. And library catalogs still seem to reflect that "only game in town" mentality, in an age where many alternatives exist.
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> Bernie Sloan
> Sora Associates
> Bloomington, IN
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Received on Fri Feb 13 2009 - 13:21:30 EST