One session I attended was described as follows:
The two presenters talked about Notre Dame's search for a "next generation" library catalog and their realizations along the way.‘Make it more like Google!’: next generation tools for library collections
Next Generation? Web 2.0? What are the next set of tools that libraries need to look at? How can we make our catalogs more useful and attractive to patrons who are increasingly familiar with Google and Yahoo, without losing our vision of what being a library should mean? Pascal Calarco and Mark Dehmlow [both of the University of Notre Dame] led a whirlwind critical review of the multitude of ‘next generation’ tools for library catalogs as a decision process for adoption and procurement. They will discuss the typical features of these tools, and some of the pros and cons of the various systems.
This presentation really reinforced the way I feel about the website redesign project I'm involved with. People have certain expectations when they use websites today. They want to create content and be engaged.
The speakers yesterday mentioned that a need of the modern researcher is "search and discovery." For some reason, though, library catalogs seem compelled to go the opposite way and don't allow the flexibility of faceted searching, for instance.
Users don't want to learn complex search strategies or controlled vocabularies, they want to type in a few keywords and get results. Another point that was made is that people are used to relevancy ranking in search results instead of the "last in, first out" structure of most library catalogs.
After reading Kotter's book about urgency, I'm really frustrated at librarianship's lack of momentum. These things about usability are not new information, yet it still doesn't seem to be a priority amongst library leaders.
We've got to escape this complacent attitude. Kotter's second tactic says it all, and that's my plan to deal with it.
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