Next Generation Catalogs

Abstract

Jenny Emanuel is passionate about the user search experience. She is young (well, younger than me) and her experience growing up with networked libraries informs her views. She doesn't rest on generalizing from herself or reading what Millennials want; she conducts usability studies and talks with a range of users to better understand which changes to library interfaces are improvements and which are just change. I asked her to set her views and research findings to paper after many conversations over our cubicle wall.--Editor For the past several years, there has been much discussion about the future of libraries in the digital age. Most of this discussion involves librarians' fears that we are failing behind technologically in meeting our patrons' information needs. As a result we've begun work to transform libraries. We have built elaborate websites incorporating electronic resources, tutorials, and social media such as blogs. We have begun to digitize collections to make them more accessible to users at a distance. We have moved from print indexes and paper journals to a system of electronic resources, giving us instant access to a plethora of both scholarly and popular media with only a few mouse clicks. Although no one can argue that these systems are perfect and will not continue to evolve in the future, one library system has continued to remain relatively unchanged from the past decade: the Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC). Or to use the language of our library users: the catalog. When I started library school seven years ago, no one questioned the library catalog and its status in the library; it was ubiquitous. I grew up with the catalog being networked in some capacity, and my visits to the library usually started with a text search on dumb terminal. There was no mouse and no navigating a fancy user interface; I navigated using a series of text commands to get to the proper menu to search for what I needed. Today that seems so simple, and as I look back, I liked how simple it was. But information needs and expectations change, and by the end of high school I was online and searching for information in an entirely different manner. Websites such as Yahoo!, Amazon, and later Google, changed how I found information. Search engines replaced the reference librarians who previously seemed almost godlike at finding obscure pieces of information. I could find book summaries and tables of contents from Amazon that before I'd have to make a trip to the library to access. My information needs were evolving--because I both transitioned to college and spent an increasingly larger amount of my time on the Internet. When I started library school, I knew I wanted to be a librarian who focused on technology and how libraries will change as more of their resources go online. By then, most libraries had a Web-based catalog that basically displayed the same data in a similar manner to the earlier text-based online catalog. The difference was that this new online catalog allowed for hyperlinking between different records and had a shiny, colorful interface that made the library appear to be on par with the rest of the Internet world. However, there were definitely grumblings about the online catalog in some library circles. It did not take long for librarians to realize that search engines such as Google and Amazon were getting better at meeting information needs while the library catalog remained static. Librarians assumed that the catalog could not change because of the underlying data; the complexity of a system that usually included acquisitions, catalog, and circulation modules; and the tangible and intangible costs associated with ongoing development. As an added bonus, library catalog vendors, knowing that they had no outside competition, continued implementing systems that were static at the time of installation and would remain static until the next major installation, which could be years in the future. …