Roy Tennant’s article in the July 2007 issue of Library Journal is entitled “Demise of the Local Catalog”. In it, he argues that the integrated library system (ILS) should “…be relegated to the backroom where it has always belonged.”
After devoting a brief section to what vendors are currently working on vis a vis metasearching and unified searching (that is, searching for information in multiple sources), Tennant then argues that the catalog will disappear and some “centralized finding tool” will take its place. His final section discusses briefly the new WorldCat Local, which is essentially WorldCat with search results ranked by location and relevance, with local holdings on top, regional holdings next, and then worldwide holdings.
Tennant does disclose his employment with OCLC, which is important since OCLC developed WorldCat Local and has a lot riding on its success. I understand that Tennant is coming at this question from the point of view of a digital librarian, and new thinking is important in our profession, but I believe that Tennant is a bit dismissive of the local catalog and the fact that most public libraries still catalog mostly print books, compact discs, and movies, not online resources and websites, and so for a lot of public libraries especially, the local catalog is the “centralized finding tool.”
What do you all think? Any other perspectives?
Submitted by Aaron K.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
6 comments:
I also have mixed feelings about Tennant's post. In a way, I can see what he means. We'll have our catalog (inventory of materials belonging to our collection) and we will also provide a finding tool that will search that inventory along with a number of other resources in order to provide more comprehensive search results to our users. I think the idea is admirable; I'm just not sure how realistic it is. Maybe more than I think. I suspect that throwing other resources (a la Google) in with our own catalog may result in an unmanageable list that doesn't get our users any closer to our actual books. I do get the feeling that Tennant isn't particularly concerned with people getting their hands on actual books. That's kind of a problem for me.
Tennant is always thinking to the future. His vision encompasses all-electronic collections. We librarians are, however, still operating in a world full of very physical objects, which require physical description, call numbers, and locations. Not the same world as Tennant's.
I know that there is a great push out there to digitize libraries' reference collections but that certainly should bring up some serious questions about copyright. Should everyone in the world have access to a book just because some library owns it? I think not. As librarians we've championed peoples right to view materials without censorship but I believe as librarians we also have to champion the intellectual rights of producers of information. Without compensation for their work why would people share? Somehow we must address that question.
I also agree with Sarah that just because we can create something that looks like Google and acts like Google will we really be helping or hindering our users?
I wonder what this means for our own home grown system. I can't help wonder what is going to happen when our programmer retires. Will the next library director want to migrate to a new system, or take a completely different approach. Like having no Dewey at all?
Oops! That last one was from me. I forgot to post my name.
JHausburg
NICE POST....
___________________
Britney
The best place for the best ENTERTAINMENT
Post a Comment