I think one of the main things that libraries and especially catalogers have to accept is that people don't want to search our catalogs. Accepting this may hurt; it may make us sad; it may even make some of us angry, but the fact is that people, especially younger ones, want the ability to search full text over lots and lots of databases with one search. That's why they like Google so much. Not because they seriously analyse the results and decide that the results are better than they could obtain through searching all of our stuff. It's easy to search Google. With one search, they think they are searching everything when they are not and when you point this out to them, that they are not searching everything, well, they explain it away by saying that what their results are "good enough." After all, they are the most "relevant" results! :-)
Library catalogs are terribly difficult to use, they have always been counterintuitive and the library catalog hasn't changed in its essence in the last 150 years, except to add on keyword searching (which got around all of our authority work).
Today, people may make a pretense of searching our catalogs, but they dislike it and immediately flip over to full text the moment they can. We have to keep this seriously in mind once the full Google Book Search becomes active. When that happens, our tools and methods will seem more and more like stone axes made by Neanderthals. And while others seem to pin great hopes on RDA, I have seen nothing at all from RDA that promises to solve any of this in any way. The very goals of RDA seem to have been written in the 19th century. If you look at the newest trends of scholarly research, it doesn't look much like "I want to find, identify, select and obtain works, expressions, manifestations, and items." (i.e. what the catalog does right now). Certainly, some people still want to be able to do this to a point, but it is far more important to them to do many other things and we are only discovering these user needs now. We are the ones who must fit into their world and not the othe!
r way aro
und. Add to this the complexity of the catalog, and even though someone may have taken an information literacy class 4 years ago, they've forgotten it all, so Google looks better and better.
The next generation catalog must become an integrated part of the world wide web. I've read a lot of polemics against Google and Google Books, but we should be happy they are here, yet the consequences to the catalog are enormous. Will our catalogs really be only for managing physical objects? Or can it do something else?
I have written a lot (I think on this list) about how Google Books is completely unorganized. While I love the materials in there, it's a bear to find them. Open archives must also be considered, along with the article databases. The catalog must work together in some way with all of these other tools.
How is a lonely, little, local library catalog going to fit into that? I think it can but it must be reconceived. We will have to give people a genuine reason to use the library catalog--and it's not enough to insist that people have no choice because it's the only way to search the physical items in the library--we have to find ways for them to want to use the catalog. Tim Spalding and LibraryThing has amazed me in this way.
Oh yeah, we need an inventory system, too but it shouldn't be integrated into the rest like the public catalog does.
It looks as if the proprietary ILMS is fated to go away and be replaced with a lot of smaller, agile systems that are built cooperatively.
Jim Weinheimer
> It has become so complex to identify and design each aspect of an ILS that
> library administrators sometimes seem to come up short in seeking librarians
> who can knowledgeably advise programmers in what we need. Catalogers may be
> perceived as failing to understand users' needs because we're so busy creating
> each record so administrators have been known dismiss our opinions entirely.
> Some reference librarians hardly use the catalo
g at all because most of their
> time is spent helping users find articles in various databases other than the
> catalog. Since those databases are generally based on less full information
> than catalog records those librarians may fail to appreciate opportunities
> unique to the catalog such as browse searching with cross-references from
> alternate forms of names, titles, or subjects. Maybe that is how we've come to
> such a sorry state regarding browse displays that cannot transparently list
> both headings and titles simultaneously (and sometimes not even reali!
> ze what we're missing). Some systems librarians who may know a little about
> website design seem intent on simply generalizing user studies of commercial
> websites to redesign catalogs. Who can bring it all together? Well, at least on
> this list there is a mixture of us who sometimes listen to each other and I'm
> grateful for that. Surely the various front-end and back-room pieces must be
> either fully compatible or integrated, but maybe both ways can serve. How can
> RDA begin to fulfill its promise if catalog systems designers are uninterested
> in optimizing even existing capabilities of catalog records for users because
> they're so complex? Thanks and have a great day,
> Jimmie
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU]
> On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
> Sent: Wednesday, March 11, 2009 3:30 AM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Whose elephant is it, anyway? (the OLE project)
>
> 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 - 10:01:28 EDT