There’s been a lot of discussion recently about the state of the catalog, both here and on other blogs. It’s such a hot topic that I get double or triple the number of messages from ngc4lib than from other lists. (If it weren’t for the incredibly interesting and insightful posts on that list, this kind of volume would force me to unsubscribe instantly, but luckily it’s worth every minute.)

People like Michael Stephens and Nicole have said that Innovative is not very innovative.

John Blyberg of blyberg.net has responded to this and similar complaints by penning an ILS Customer Bill of Rights.

Over on One Big Library, dchud has been arguing that there’s a problem with this bill of rights because we signed the contracts so we’ve only ourselves to blame. And surprise, surprise, this has sparked off more discussion.

Someone has even put together an Amazon interface as it would look if Amazon were an “OPAC”(via TTW).

Now, don’t lynch me before you hear me through to the end, but I’ve got to add another bit to this whole discussion. At our last users group meeting Dinah Sanders was talking to people at the reception, and the topic of conversation was pretty predictable given the general state of things. These users all wanted to be able to do stuff with the catalog… web 2.0 stuff, fun stuff, necessary stuff, stuff that should be do-able. And Dinah’s response was always the same. She’s been wanting to do all that, too, but there’s no time, and they aren’t supposed to fix stuff unless they’re actively supposed to be working on that module or code. Her refrain was (and I quote), “As we touch it, we can fix it.” YIKES!!!!!! That’s the definition of over-extended! It must be horribly frustrating to work on a project where you can see necessary fixes but can’t do anything about it.

Wait! Don’t tar and feather me yet. Hold off for a few more seconds. Remember, I said I can empathize. But this undesirable situation is exactly why we need to rethink the ILS. If it were modular, each part could be engineered by people who had time to keep up with technology. If it were modular, the discovery system wouldn’t have to be designed by companies that excel in collection or budget management, for example.

There would be new problems with this modular approach, of course, and standards would have to be clear so that the modules could be seamlessly interoperable. But having a system that’s so big that obsolete code can’t be fixed unless the entire section is being reworked anyway is a long way from a perfect solution.

Scream if you’re tired of this subject, but I’m studying hard for my presentation and thought as long as I was keeping notes and collecting URLs I might as well share them with anyone else who’s studying this topic.

First of all, here are some links to catalogs that are doing cool things:

• NCSU (relevance ranking, instant browse and narrowing options by subject)
• Ann Arbor District Library (retro-looking user comments)
• Lamson Library (WordPress-powered interface)
• Hennepin County Library (user comments)

(I’m still trying to find examples of AJAX-enhansed searches, but the only one that I know of is not, I think, public. You can see examples of LiveSearch by OCLC on Lorcan Dempsey’s PowerPoint slides.) [Update: Thom from OCLC Research has pointed me toward Phoenix Live, which uses AJAX to pre-search as you type. Thanks Thom!]

I’ve also just stumbled across Karen Schneider’s three part discussion on what we need to change in our catalogs over on ALA TechSource (found via Panlibus). Food for thought.

Oh, and I’ve decided to try del.icio.us out (been a furl user so far), so I’m collecting these catalog examples there. Collections of blog postings and other research are (so far) only here on my blog.

Thomas, over on TechEssence.Info, has a great post about the problem of forcing users to learn to use the catalog. He poses one of the central questions about the catalog:

And this was the comment that I keep chewing on: ““Students are in college to learn, so what’s so bad about forcing them to learn the catalog?”” I’’m still not sure how best to respond to this (although, “”Isn’’t that what we do now? And why we’re having day-long conferences on why our users are migrating to Google?”” is high on the list).

And like Thomas, I’m anything but sure what a good answer to that comment might be. On the one hand, I’m a firm believer in having catalogs serve users. Who isn’t? But in an academic library, where we get must meet the entire range of research needs, how important is it to have more complicated systems that can perform more complicated searches? I know that I tend to be able to manipulate a system to better advantage when I’ve been forced to figure out it’s inner workings. But then, that’s how I learn. That’s not how everybody learns. And quite frequently, my students only have enough time to work on their assignments, let alone familiarize themselves with an arguably arcane web application that provides very little in the way of automated help.

On the other hand, perhaps we’re finally to the point where technology is good enough that people don’t have to know how a program works in order to use it well. Maybe we can simplify things now without sacrificing valuable knowledge.

I’m still working to figure out what the future of the catalog looks like (in preparation for a short presentation in 10 days), and I’m beginning to realize that I’m doing this at precisely the best time. Nothing’s really been figured out already, so there’s still room for imagination. And yet, it’s becoming a major topic of discussion, so people can learn from each other’s imagination and leapfrog to new possibilities.

I’m particularly interested in a couple of themes that keep cropping up.

• Allowing user commenting and tagging (the Hennepin County Library’s already doing this – via Library Stuff and TTW).
• Separating the inventory mechanisms from the end user searching mechanisms.
• Giving users choices rather than deciding for them what display options are best for them, or what delivery options will fit their needs.
• Integrating information discovery into the user’s workflow (like Amazon is, via Dempsey).
• Creating visual representations (such as tag, Dewey, or subject clouds like this one).
• Leveraging metadata from multiple sources to improve services (metadata from Amazon, WorldCat, and in an academic environment things like class enrollment or year in school might also be useful).
• Using RSS and other Web 2.0 features to push information out to the user’s environment (such as classes, clubs, etc)

Lorcan Dempsey has a rich set of posts on these and related issues. If you start here he leads you to related posts.

There are some more extreme ideas that may or may not come to fruition (such as eliminating LCSH or eliminating subject classification, as Calhoun mentions as an option and many, many people have critiqued).

There’s also the related issue of what happens when we scan all the books, as Google’s trying to do. There’s been a lot of talk of the NTY Magazine article called “Scan This Book” (Sunday, May 14th, 2006). The Gypsy Librarian, the O’Reilly Radar, and the Library Garden have all written very interesting responses to that article. What would discovery look like if this vision of the future came true? I don’t have answers…just questions.

Here’s an excellent post by Lorcan Dempsey about the catalog and the user.