At ALA I shared a podium with John Blyberg and Tim Spalding, and we all gave presentations about "next generation library catalogs" as sponsored by the ALA Next Generation Library Special Catalog Interest Group. Here a blurb and a link to mine:
The Next Next-Generation Library Catalog
With the advent of the Internet and wide-scale availability of
full-text content, people are overwhelmed with the amount of
accessible data and information. Library catalogs can only go so
far when it comes to delimiting what is relevant and what is not.
Even when the most exact searches return 100′s of hits what is a
person to do? Services against texts — digital humanities
computing techniques — represent a possible answer. Whether the
content is represented by novels, works of literature, or
scholarly journal articles the methods of the digital humanities
can provide ways to compare & contrast, analyze, and make more
useful any type of content. This essay elaborates on these ideas
and describes how they can be integrated into the "next,
next-generation library catalog"...
The next "next generation library catalog" is not about find,
instead it is about use. Integrating digital humanities computing
techniques into library collections and services is just one
example of how this can be done.
http://tinyurl.com/3xcwood
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Eric Lease Morgan
University of Notre Dame
Received on Wed Jun 30 2010 - 10:23:09 EDT