Re: User tasks--outdated? Why?

I think that no one should take everything they read in an email literally. 

I was not suggesting we rely only on "... to a person, who is on duty from 9am to 6pm 6 days a week".  It seems to me that Karen could not find out what other books the author had written because her library didn't carry all of books by that person. She went to another source, but one of those sources could have been a live person.  Good grief. Everybody take a chill pill. 

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Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
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________________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Jonathan Rochkind [rochkind_at_JHU.EDU]
Sent: Wednesday, October 21, 2009 5:39 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] User tasks--outdated? Why?

Miksa, Shawne wrote:
>
> And, the idea of going outside of a library's system to see what is in the library leaves me with a chill.  It's sort of like wiping all the unique local restaurants off the map and making everyone eat in a huge and impersonal cafeteria.
Well, I think it's pretty clear that's what we've got to do to serve our
users, chill or no.  But we need to do this precisely because users
aren't going to use just one place to look for things, and the more
places we put our stuff, the more of our users will be served by finding
it.

That doesn't mean we get out of the business of providing search
interfaces. I don't think we do. And if we can provide sophisticated
tools that our users want to use, they'll use em (syllogism there).
They'll use em in addition to everything else they use -- and they'll be
happy to see library holdings in other things they use too.

There's no benefit we're going to get by trying to hold our information
hostage in our interface only. The more our information gets out there,
the more that will be done with it by third parties to serve our users.


> Of the catalog couldn't answer that question, but I bet a reference librarian could.
>

If the only way we can answer sophisticated questions is with in-person
mediated service, then we are doomed.  But that's not the only way we
can answer sophisticated questions. We are quite capable of providing
systems and the metadata to support them to answer sophisticated
questions.   We've just got to start doing it. We shouldn't _stop_
providing reference librarians either. But it's ridiculous to suggest
it's serving our users well to say "We are not going to provide systems
that can do what you want, the only way you can get what you need need
is to talk to a person, who is on duty from 9am to 6pm 6 days a week."
That is not serving our users well.  I mean we know that, right? Why do
we provide catalogs on the web at all?


Jonathan