Of course circulation is a public service--now. It originally was set up as inventory control so that we could keep track of where our books actually were; in the beginning there was no place to show a user that an item was checked out. There were no public interfaces; there was only the card catalog. And cataloging (as important as it is) is a public service in that it provides the data that underlies the public interface. All the excellent cataloging in the world won't help us if the interface does not make it easy or intuitive to find that excellent work. But that is a digression. This is not about public vs. technical services. What it is about is working together and determining how the two parts of a system interact.
Michael's second paragraph hits the nail on the head. More searching power is exactly what is needed, especially in large databases. And while It would be great to give reference librarians more power, most users don't come to reference librarians as much these days as they might have done in the past. What power are we going to give to the user who wants self-service searching without requiring that user to learn a lot about how records are constructed? It is that answer that should be driving at least some of our discussions. The fact that OLE does not provide opportunities for such discussion makes it less likely to be an effective solution.
Mary
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Mary Pagliero Popp, Public Services Librarian
Library Information Technology,
Wells Library W501, Indiana University,
1320 E. 10th Street, Bloomington, IN 47405
popp_at_indiana.edu 812-855-8170 FAX: 812-856-4979
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Michael Fitzgerald
Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 10:12 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Whose elephant is it, anyway? (the OLE project)
At 09:54 PM 3/10/2009, Mary wrote:
>Throughout the history of the development of automated library systems,
>the back room activities were the driving factors in development. We
>started with circulation and added back room cataloging.
Oh please - like circulation isn't a public service? Or cataloging?
The totality of the library serves the public - acquisitions included (are we acquiring things for staff-only use?). It's a very myopic view that says that only the OPAC matters to the public. Why should this be viewed as a divisive tech services vs. public services situation?
I would love to see a library system that gives more power to the reference librarian so that the public can be better served. Right now, most of the tools are so poor that cataloging data that has already been input cannot be easily retrieved and used in the kinds of sophisticated searches that pinpoint what users need. Too often the reference librarians on the front lines are forced to throw some keywords at a search box and they fare about as well as a civilian would, even when they know in their heads how to do a better search - they are frustrated by the limitations of the current systems (and who has time to do a "create lists" kind of search with the patron at the desk?). Thankfully, we have started to see more MARC data being leveraged in next generation systems, and hopefully that will mean that cataloging will make use of more of the appropriate fields instead of ignoring them "because they don't show up in the OPAC anyway".
It's all connected and as Sharon wrote, it's about good interfaces between the systems.
Mike
www.crj-online.org
www.jazzdiscography.com
Received on Tue Mar 10 2009 - 22:53:57 EDT