I totally agree that librarians need effective management systems, and
that we definitely don't have them now. In fact, one of the most
frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as
they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user
interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from
designing or implementing improved "back end" systems because of the
dependencies introduced by the new "discovery layer" applications. One
of the things that intrigues me most about the whole Semantic
Web/linked data movement is that it would seem to open up the
possibility of libraries not having to worry so much about designing
and maintaining their own user interfaces at all. If our metadata and
communication standards, and the systems we use to manage the
resources we collect, were open enough, and therefore able to be
integrated seamlessly into general discovery interfaces like Google,
Facebook, etc., it would allow librarians to focus on collecting and
organizing stuff (which is challenging enough to do well), and let the
folks with the resources to do really good usability research and hire
lots of really good programmers to design the interfaces.
Shirley
> This is what convinced me that we need to separate the management functions
> from the user service functions. Libraries must have systems that allow them
> to manage the library's business functions, and those systems have to work
> well. By tying the user functions to the same product, user services
> necessarily take second place in terms of system development and selection.
> What we haven't yet been able to envision is what this separation means for
> the data that we create, although I think that systems like LibraryThing and
> potentially Open Library show the possibility that a user layer can allow
> users to participate in the data augmentation and organization of the data,
> and can improve the user experience greatly.
Received on Sat Mar 07 2009 - 10:48:58 EST