Next‐gen Library Catalogs

Citation

Parry, F. (2011), "Next‐gen Library Catalogs", The Electronic Library, Vol. 29 No. 2, pp. 278-279. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640471111125230

This book on next generation catalogues (NGCs) poses the question – What place the library catalogue in the modern world? The Holy Grail for NGCs is a single platform for searching multiple catalogues and resources combined with the interactive and personalisation facilities of Web 2.0.

The author is well placed to write about this subject. He is the creator and editor of Library Technology Guides that includes extensive reporting on world‐wide take up of various NGCs, and his web site is linked via this book series' companion wiki.

Why do libraries need NGCs? The term “catalogue” doesn't encompass all that is in the library so customers are often confused about what to expect from them. Breeding proposes the term “discovery interfaces”, although I am not sure that this is much of an improvement. The bad news for libraries is that their catalogues are clunky and are being left behind by the significant search tools provided by the “competition” – Google and numerous e‐commerce sites.

The meat of this short book, however, is in the chapter on planning. NGCs need to retain the same level of sophistication as previous catalogues but with much greater ease of use – they should need no instruction. Breeding takes us through desirable features such as personalisation, faceted navigation, relevancy ranking and user recommendations. He also takes a detailed look at the portfolios of the companies offering new discovery interface products and where some of these systems have been implemented.

Breeding feels that NGCs operating through the harvesting of metadata offer the best way forward. But many publishers are reluctant to allow content to be searched this way. Libraries are therefore faced with the option of having to select an NGC in a fast moving market where products are not developed sufficiently to include all a library needs to provide a single platform for their customers. To counter this point, Breeding recommends that libraries should aim for improvement rather than perfection. Library managers will have to come to their own conclusions about this, based probably on how great the need for improvement is manifested in dissatisfaction with existing systems and how much money, time and experience can be made available.

Other chapters include one on the implementation on a new discovery tool and Breeding is particularly strong on laying the groundwork, managing change and involving all staff. It is also good to see just how much space he has given to the marketing strategy – if you spend time, money and a lot of hard work implementing a new system it has to be “sold” to both library customers and staff. Breeding makes some good suggestions about best practices such as the one which recommends the need to clean up and maintain high quality metadata from a variety of sources. One has only to look at the uneven quality of records from Google Scholar to appreciate this point. His final chapter looks at web analytics and reporting tools, which measure the success of the exercise.