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.
I love that trilogy of articles by Karen. Really, really thought-provoking.
Just for fun, here are my three favorite quotes from part three of Karen’s articles.
1)Have you ever owned a tool that did too many things, none of them well? Perhaps the greatest literalism of all, with respect to integrated library systems, is that they are one continuous product to begin with. Lorcan Dempsey, VP of OCLC, has been making the case on his blog that the next-generation integrated library system should be dis-integrated. He points out that the modern ILS weds an inventory system with a discovery system—in the end doing poorly at both.
2)The catalog of the future wouldn’t be a catalog; it would be a series of standards-compliant Web services that could be mixed and matched.
3)The local record would be obsolete. Libraries would use global records, locally modified as the spirit and the budget moved them. Discovery would be a rich, satisfying experience that would leverage the potentially powerful combination of library-generated metadata, user tagging and other user interactivity, and full-text Web discovery.
There’s an older rougher version of a ‘live’ search we (OCLC Research) have done at http://phoenix.orhost.org.
These are records from the Phoenix public library.
If the site isn’t up, let me know and I’ll restart it.
–Th
Thanks Thom! This’ll give people a taste of what I mean when I talk about this type of searching.