Transcript The future of the catalogue Warwick Cathro Assistant DirectorGeneral, Innovation Under-used catalogues? “1% of Americans (2% of college students) start an electronic information search.

The future of the catalogue
Warwick Cathro
Assistant DirectorGeneral, Innovation
Under-used catalogues?
“1% of Americans (2% of college students) start an
electronic information search at a library web site”
Perceptions of libraries and information resources (OCLC, 2005). Appendix A
“Today, a large and growing number of students and
scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in favor of
other discovery tools”
“The catalog is in decline, its processes and structures
are unsustainable, and change needs to be swift”
The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other discovery
tools (Karen Calhoun for the Library of Congress, 2006)
Under-used collections?
“Very frequently, very large proportions of the collection do not ever
circulate. A University of Pittsburgh study … indicated that
39.8% of all the books that the university library had bought
were never used during the first six years in the library”.
Charles D. Bernholz, Weeding the Reference Collection: A Review of the
Literature
“This article reports on an evaluation of recent monograph
selections in a small academic health sciences library. Actual
use of each new book was determined from date-due slips. The
startling result was that more than 60% of recent selections had
been used little or not at all”.
Ruth E. Fenske Evaluation of monograph selection in a health sciences library
The long tail
“Unlimited selection is revealing truths about
what consumers want .... People are going
deep into the catalog … and the more they
find, the more they like. As they wander
further from the beaten path, they discover
their taste is not as mainstream as they
thought”
- Chris Anderson. The long tail. Wired magazine, October 2004
A paradox
“Libraries enable unmediated access to the
world’s journal literature through indexes and
databases but give priority to their own
collections when it comes to the discovery
and delivery of books and other non-serial
items”
Judith Pearce. New Frameworks for Resource Discovery and
Delivery (2005)
Union catalogues [1]
“Union catalogues are still a missing part of
the service framework. In order to realise the
benefits of the significant investment libraries
have made in these tools over the years, they
need to be promoted as a primary means of
access to wanted resources in library
collections”
Judith Pearce. New Frameworks for Resource Discovery and Delivery
(2005)
Union catalogues [2]
“Fewer but larger pools of metadata to support
discovery would help”
Lorcan Dempsey, D-Lib, April 2006
“Research libraries and their partners will deploy
shared catalogs as a key component of providing
affordable global access to larger, richer collections
than any single institution could house locally”
The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other
discovery tools (Karen Calhoun for the Library of Congress, 2006)
Alternative discovery pathways [1]
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Examples:
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Google
Amazon
Libraries Australia
Users need the choice of getting the item from
a library
Therefore, the local library system and its data
remains important to the getting process
Alternative discovery pathways [2]
“[Build] the necessary infrastructure to permit
global discovery and delivery of information
among open, loosely-coupled systems (e.g.,
find it on Google, get it from your library)”
The changing nature of the catalog and its integration with other
discovery tools (Karen Calhoun for the Library of Congress, 2006)
Review of future of NLA catalogue
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Considered the proposition that “the Library
replace its catalogue by Libraries Australia,
as the primary database to be searched by
users”
Examined the “enablers” and inhibitors” to
this proposition
NLA’s assumptions
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We will continue to use our ILMS for workflow support
Users should be able to find all relevant resources that
they are able to access
Users need to be fully aware of what they are searching
We need to offer users a primary or “default” search target
Most users prefer a simple (Google-like) search interface
Users need an easy requesting interface with follow-up
capability
Using Libraries Australia: enablers
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Users would access a wider pool of library resources
Our union catalogue is now a free search target
All records in our local catalogue are in the union
catalogue
The union catalogue now has better functionality
We have power to improve the union catalogue’s
functionality
We can enhance the user’s experience through
integration with other discovery services
Using Libraries Australia: Inhibitors
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Links to the local system
Potential for user confusion
Data missing from the union catalogue
Links to the local system
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Deep links
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ugly interface transition
links are not standards based
hence there is a significant effort to maintain them
Web Services protocol
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Z39.50 Holdings Schema
Or XML Holdings Schema
Requesting the resource
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Need for a simple, stateless protocol
Web Service
OpenURL
Potential for user confusion
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Scope of their search
Difficulty in navigating results in the union
catalogue
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Quality control
Clustering of result sets
Data missing from the union
catalogue
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Copy-specific information
Local information about formed
collections
Links to record sets
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Linking URLs may not be permitted in union
catalogues
The future [1]
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Progress standards process
Analyse incorporation of institution specific
data in union catalogue
Examine use of access controls for links to
record sets
Changes to our web site
The future [2]
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Improve presentation of results sets in the
union catalogue:
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relevance ranking
result clustering
Improve quality of data in union catalogue
What can my library do?
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Encourage my ILMS vendor to plan support
for the Z39.50 Holdings Schema or the XML
Holdings Schema:
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http://www.loc.gov/z3950/agency/defns/holdings1-4.html
http://www.unt.edu/xmlholdings/ScopeOfProject.html
Raise with my ILMS vendor the need for a
“web services” approach to receiving
requests and monitoring their status
Conclusion
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The NLA aims to make Libraries Australia the
primary database to be searched by our
users
The Library will undertake a medium term
project to address the inhibitors that it has
identified