B.G. Sloan wrote:
>
> Shouldn't the library community take at least some responsibility for designing systems to help library users?
>
On this subject, there was a series of postings to Autocat in 1994 under
the title "Face the Interface" which generated some debate back then.
Later, in a list predating the Toronto AACR Conference of 1997, the
quest for better OPAC interfaces was aired as well. It was also coming
up in the RDA discussion list of late. There have been no tangible
results. One aspect that was frequently put forward was the lack of
browsable indexes in some or even many opacs. But I doubt this has found
its way into many RFPs. The concept is also absent in VuFind and other
open source products. (I sometimes doubt the developers even understand
the usefulness.)
With this background, I have been sceptical from the beginning about the
possible results of NGC4LIB. Although of course the obstacles to
achieving better interfaces are no longer the huge technical ones of
1994. The key will always, I think, be the qualities of our metadata,
and I don't mean the format - that's only the wrapper. But now, RDA is
the only show in town that promises to deliver new quality metadata.
It does not, however, care about browsing, it does not deal with
catalog enrichment at all, but it should enable data linking in more and
better ways than AACR. But will it? And then when?
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Mar 11 2009 - 03:31:18 EDT