Apologies for cross-posting:
*Is It Already Too Late For the Catalog?*
ALCTS Catalog Form and Function Interest Group Saturday, June 25, 10:30 am-12:00 noon Morial Convention Center, Room 355 ALA Annual Conference, New Orleans, LA
*The Catalog is Dead. Long Live the Catalog!* /Matthew Beacom/, Metadata Librarian, Yale University Library
It is not too late for the catalog. It is only too late for one idea of what the catalog is--an online version of the card catalog. The idea of the OPAC is dead, and all the existing OPACs are the last of their kind.
Our reliance on the MARC21 communication format, AACR2, and other infrastructures of shared cataloging practice is ending. But the catalog lives! It lives because it exists to facilitate discovery and use of the materials in a library's collections and to integrate such discovery and use with a environment of networked information. New technology is not killing the catalog; new technology is enabling us to fulfill the promise of the catalog.
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Too Late for the Library Catalog? Inconceivable!* /Courtney Greene,/ Head, Digital User Experience Department, Indiana University Bloomington Libraries
Library catalog usage statistics may be down, but as Miracle Max says in The Princess Bride, "Mostly dead is slightly alive." At Indiana University Bloomington Libraries, we're committed to fighting the good
fight: this summer, we launch EBSCO Discovery Service, a new venue through which to present our catalog records to users; and next summer, we will implement a discovery layer interface for IUCAT, the IU Libraries' shared catalog. These parallel projects have raised some big questions, among them: As we scale up to deliver our data to multiple systems, how do we balance the kind of attention to detail that's necessary to provide an excellent user experience in each with the realities of constrained resources and staff time? While this presentation makes no promises to deliver definitive answers to this or other stumpers, it will share how we articulated priorities and developed a rubric for selecting a discovery layer/next-generation catalog interface, and discuss how we've approached some of the thornier issues we've encountered thus far in presenting our catalog data within a third-party discovery tool.
*Rosetta Through the Lens of Primo: Moving Metadata to the Fore* /Rachel Jaffe/, Metadata/Catalog Librarian, Binghamton University Libraries
Concurrent with the purchase of the Rosetta DPS, Binghamton University Libraries is in the process of implementing Primo. BU Libraries is the first library to display Rosetta through Primo. Using the new discovery layer, users will be able to pull together results from the libraries'
print and digital collections. While this sort of search functionality can be exciting, the creation of combined result sets means that we need to be especially attentive to the metadata we create for our digital
collections: which Dublin Core fields will be included, how will they be indexed and labeled, and most importantly, how will they be mapped and matched against MARC? As we touch on some of the problems and solutions we've encountered in defining best practices, we'll also make a case for the relevancy of "the catalog" not only as search tool and content holder, but as a generative and interactive platform.
*Search Limit Behaviors of Discovery Platform Users Compared to Classic Catalog Users* /Terry Ballard/, Assistant Director of Technical Services for Library Systems, New York Law School, Mendik Library
Librarians at the New York Law School found, in a year of search logs, that searches in the online catalog were limited, or refined, less than
1 percent of the time. However, that library also has the discovery tool from Innovative Interfaces, and search data from that showed that ten percent of search lines were the result of patrons using the facets or tag clouds in Encore. In this presentation, Ballard will show how the data is analyzed using Google Analytics. He will also present confirming information from other libraries who have the Innovative Classic and Encore discovery combination. Finally, he will present data from libraries using other platforms such as Aquabrowser and Summon.
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Katherine L. Harvey
Catalog Maintenance Projects Librarian
UCI Libraries
P.O. Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92623-9557
(949) 824-1541
kharvey_at_uci.edu<mailto:kharvey_at_uci.edu>
Cheryl Gowing
Director, Information Mgmt & Systems
University of Miami Richter Library
Coral Gables, FL 33124-0320
(305) 284-6018 (305) 505-2898 (cell)
(305) 284-4721 (fax) cgowing_at_miami.edu<mailto:cgowing_at_miami.edu>
Received on Mon Jun 20 2011 - 10:58:59 EDT