Future of the Catalogue

One of the highlights of Elisad was hearing metadata expert Karen Coyle speak. Her paper Future of the Catalog was unusual for Elisad in that no reference was made to AOD, but it was no less riveting for that, and probably very healthy for subject specialists to be faced with a wider perspective.

Beginning with stats on how (American) students begin their searches from OCLC’s 2005 report Perceptions of libraries and information resources, Karen took us through an example search for information on the book Lolita using the route the average student would take. She then discussed why students might be more attracted to non-library catalogue searches, highlighting that:

[web resources]

• link out to other resources
• allow others to link in
• [have] open format in terms of content
• allow user contribution

[while] library catalogs

• [are] closed: rarely link out or in
• [have] data not visible on the web
• use a format that is only used in libraries
• don’t allow user input

Karen made it clear, here, that she was talking in general terms, and referenced several catalogues that have embraced Web 2.0 features to buck the closed off LMS trend.

Finally, she highlighted two projects that are turning bibliographic data and its use on its head: The Open Library and the NSDL Registry. One of the key things she drew our attention to was that bibliographic data used to be of interest only to libraries, but now it is being used in innovative ways by a range of organisations, such as Amazon, LibraryThing and even Wikipedia. Indeed, she reported that the founder of The Open Library was a nineteen-year-old web specialist and she was the only information-trained person on the team.

If there was one message to take away from this presentation it had to be GET INVOLVED … even, dare I say it, with non-library-led initiatives.