Alex said:
> ...
> But the library as a public service to the masses won't hold up to
> selection; it is this *very* selection that makes people go straight
> for Amazon.com instead of putting themselves on the 3 month waiting
> queue for some popular and selected book.
This and more of what he and others wrote in this thread indicates
that what's at issue and at stake is the entire library "business
model", not just the catalog.
"What's the next generation library?", ought to be the question, or
even before that, "Will there be one?"
Would libraries not be marginalized very quickly if all materials
that exist in digital formats were to be set free? In that unlikely
event, local collections lose most, if not all, of their appeal,
except as repositories of physical objects some people might want
to inspect as such and physically.
Already, as was stated repeatedly, catalogs are no longer the tools
of choice in the quest for books. This is not just because of their
awkwardness but, I think, because books (and articles) are not
what most people want in most cases: they have questions and they
want answers, and right away go on with their jobs . Before the Web,
when all else failed - and that was much more often than today - they
had to think "library" and "book", then to go visit the former and find
the latter, in a catalog.
This laborious protocol evolved historically to provide access to
scarce resources. It was efficient as long as it was the only way,
it feels hideously inefficient now. It would be called obsolete
if only there weren't still the intellectual property issues that keep
much stuff under electronic lock and key.
It doesn't help to enrich catalogs with digital resources
since these can be found elsewhere, in other contexts, and are
not physically related with a library but can be accessed anywhere,
no need to know where they live. That won't save the idea of
the catalog.
Alexander's advice: "Oh, and build a goddamn search engine."
is a bit unspecific. The Hathi people have resources and are hard at
work rigging something up that's supposed to become better than
catalogs, maybe they are the ones now closest to *what can be done*,
including full-text searching:
http://www.hathitrust.org/
Their search portal has a funny name:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/
They can open up the full text within the walls of their
institutions at least, and then see what happens. And tell us.
Might not someone from that group contribute to this forum and
disclose some of their insight about catalogs and search engines?
Tell us what's promising, what works, and what not? What approaches they
tried and abandoned or are pursuing further, and for what reasons? What
research issues have been identified and need to be solved?
And as soon as everything is open and accessible, the need for
selection goes away. Rather, it becomes a "user task", as FRBR
in its sublime wisdom has already pinned down. The "find" user
task must then be supposed to operate on the entire body of
indexed materials, selection for those "that meet the user's
requirements" is then the job of software and its dialog with
the user. That's where the search engine that replaces the
catalog will have to unfold its awesome RDA powers, and grind
commercial search services into the dust, in that it selects
what matters the most, not what sells the most or is pointed to
the most or clicked on the most - all of which mere correlations,
not approximations of quality. (Only don't stick "RDA powered"
labels on it; that moniker must be among the most disingenuous ever
concocted.)
Yes, Alex, the matter is urgent, the Titanic is close to the
iceberg. And of course our Titanic is not the catalog, it is the
library.
B.Eversberg
Received on Wed Jul 07 2010 - 07:13:28 EDT