NCSU Debuts New Catalog
-- Library Journal, 1/21/2006
North Carolina State University Libraries (NCSU) has taken an important step in making catalogs more robust and user-friendly, deploying the Endeca ProFind™ platform to add capabilities patrons expect from web browsing. The catalog now can provide search results ranked by relevance, and users can refine navigation by topic, author, genre, language, material type, format, and availability. Sorting options include publication date, title, author, call number, and popularity. Also, the application displays a "breadcrumb" of the refinements selected that allows backtracking and broadening of search results. Also, users can browse by subject without searching at all.
Endeca's technology is used in TLC's CARL•X library system that has been installed in a few public libraries, but NCSU worked directly with the company, which mainly sells its software to retailers. Andrew Pace, NCSU's head of systems, said that last year he began examining Endeca and similar products offered by AquaBrowser and RLG. NCSU is known for being on the leading edge; vice provost and director of libraries Susan K. Nutter was LJ's 2005 Librarian of the Year.
Pace, known for his colorful denunciations of OPACs, said, "We don't have any relevance in Sirsi—the last thing cataloged is at the top of the list, which is not great when you add 5000 government documents in a batch load. We're hoping to expose titles that users wouldn't be able to find." While other libraries may be using Endeca technology, "the thing that's really first for [our library] is the [Library of Congress] classification browsing. We took LC subject headings and broke them up into their four component parts."
