Ed Jones wrote:
> I don't use external discovery tools necessarily because they're superior to
> the catalog, but rather because they search the Web, and increasingly that's
> where the action is. If I search in my OPAC, I'm excluding much of
> the world.
This is a good point, and it's one that has bothered me for a long time. In theoretical terms, I think that it's a change in the *definition of the collection* in that it is a fiction to define the "library's collection" as the materials inside the library (and leased from specific vendors). The wire that comes out of everybody's machine, linking everything together, changed that quite some time ago, and with the Internet Archive, Google Books, etc. etc. etc. all with worthwhile materials that are even easier to get than the books on the shelves of my library, the current catalog bears less and less relevance to what is *really* available to our users.
That's why in my catalog, I have implemented my extend search. So the user, after finding something interesting, e.g. http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=1785 can select any text in the record, in this case, select the subject "Art, Roman Egyptian influences." and a box pops up which will allow the user to extend the search into all kinds of databases, specially chosen by me. So, you can search WorldCat, Google Books, Google Scholar, but dozens of others as well.
In the section "General Search Engines," you search Google, but you are also searching a lot more, so people can immediately see what they are missing if they *only* search Google. There is help through a series of "2-Minute Tutorials" (true to their name!) along the way.
I think with my "Extend Search" users can make a search that more truly resembles "the collection of materials available to them" than only searching Google or Amazon, or of course, the local library catalog.
I get concerned with the idea of "one-stop shopping" and think it is much better to show people what is really available to them. I can add new databases as I find them, and can organize them in different ways.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Thu May 07 2009 - 03:13:06 EDT