Transcript The future of the catalogue Warwick Cathro Assistant DirectorGeneral, Innovation Calhoun report [1] “Today, a large and growing number of students and scholars routinely.

The future of the catalogue
Warwick Cathro
Assistant DirectorGeneral, Innovation
Calhoun report [1]
“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”
Calhoun report [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)”
Alternative discovery pathways
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Examples:
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Google
Amazon
Libraries Australia
The local library system and its data is still
relevant
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
http://www.nla.gov.au/nla/staffpaper/2005/pearce1.html
Union catalogues
“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”
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
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”
- Karen Calhoun
NLA’s assumptions
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We will continue to use our ILMS
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 followup 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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significant effort to maintain
ugly interface transition
link relies on deprecated Z39.50 OPAC schema
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
Conclusion
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The NLA has identified a case for a medium
term project to change the way that users
search the NLA collection and the nation’s
collections