Sloan <bgsloan2_at_yahoo.com> wrote:
> I'm not so sure I agree that, in some future world, the catalog "will still be the
> key to it all." I'm not even sure that the catalog is "the key to it all" now. I
> know it's not "the key to it all" for me. It's more like an inventory tool for me.
I agree with this; I think the future is for libraries to become a
part of information management infra-structure of the world, and try
to get away from "that place down the road where you can get books."
I'm not sure how many times I've said this, but the future of
information management does not lie in *bibliographic* meta data, nor
in the management of physical objects. No, it lies in giving
information management services to the world who needs it, like
identity management, knowledge extraction and curation, virtual
hosting of journals (and semantics between them), and so on. We need
librarians and catalogers to scour the net and sort it out in ways
that people would need. Books and structure is out, chaos and overload
is in.
> I remember reading a couple of studies about the discovery methods
> used by academics. I can't recall a lot of details, but I do remember that
> the library catalog wasn't "the key to it all" when it came to their information
> seeking behavior.
The more people use the catalog, the less they trust their library
having the resources they need. The library (including OCLC or some
other world-wide library catalog) simply isn't big enough to support
all that they might want to get; blogs, deep data, other online stuff
like chatter and tips, intra nets, and on and on the list goes.
Unless the library grok this distance between what the library has got
and traditionally have done with where the future is heading, there
simply may not be a library future. I know that's bleak, but tell me
otherwise ...
Regards,
Alex
--
Project Wrangler, SOA, Information Alchemist, UX, RESTafarian, Topic Maps
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Received on Mon Jun 28 2010 - 21:59:01 EDT