The Library Catalogue Issue... : Fixing Library Discovery

Just a few days ago I had a discussion about our OPAC with a colleague. I told her that the overviews we are making of our medical library collection by subjects and by publication type should be possible to generate easily from within our Library Catalogue. And not only by us, but of course by the users. The overviews are only useful if the Catalogue is properly maintained and if all records get proper subject keywords. Our Catalogue it the typical example of a by-product of a acquisition system, a traditional library system with modules that focus on administrative functions instead of functional services for the users. Tomorrow I am going to show her the new Catalogue of the North Carolina State University (NCSU) and let her read the column of Roy Tennant in LibraryJournal.com of a few days ago. Fixing Library Discovery By Roy Tennant , LibraryJournal.com, June 15, 2006 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6341887.html Roy mentions s he is "seeing some major new interface initiatives by libraries and vendors to address this problem"

• NCSU extracted all one million plus records from the ILS and gave them to the Endeca software company. "All the various facets of the records are displayed in a left sidebar, aggregated and exposed so I can simply click on a selection such as Dictionaries to see a historical dictionary of the Gypsies. It's quite powerful to expose the richness of the underlying metadata in an easy-to-understand interface" This Catalogue is worth having a long good look and think about it, and while you're at it have a look at the rest of the Library site as well. It looks great.
• Ex-Libris is set to unveil Primo at the American Library Association annual conference in June in New Orleans, Ex Libris is trying to create a next-generation finding tool. It isn''t a library catalog, but it is touted as an ''enterprise-level solution for the discovery of institutional content'

A few recent posts about the Catalogue:

• -=( In Between )=-: The future of the catalog http://digilib.weblog.ub.rug.nl/trackback/42
• Lorcan Dempsey "Lifting out the catalog discovery experience"