A Revolution in Access?

A report from the Bibliographic Services Task Force of the University of California (UC) Libraries offers potent criticism of current practices and urges major changes in systemwide cataloging and access—a reflection of anxieties and potential solutions shared in the wider library community. “Our users expect simplicity and immediate reward and Amazon, Google, and iTunes are the standards against which we are judged. Our current systems pale beside them,” states the report, “Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California” (see libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf).

“The current Library catalog is poorly designed for the tasks of finding, discovering, and selecting the growing set of resources available in our libraries,” the report states. “It is best at locating and obtaining a known item.”

“I think there's a message when faculty and grad students tell us they do a search on Amazon first to figure out what they want and then come to the library system to figure out if it's checked in,” Terry Ryan, associate university librarian for the UCLA Electronic Library, told LJ. “People should come to the library for a rich set of value adds. It's time for some transformative planning. Also, there are things we can do, because they're being done.”

New workflow?

The report is particularly harsh regarding current work processes, pointing out that people perform duplicative work through the system. “Given its prohibitive cost, staff-created metadata should be applied only when there is proven value for current and future scholars.” The report calls for centralization and/or better coordination of services and data, including the possibility of a single catalog interface for the entire UC system. Among the suggestions: provide direct access to an item; provide recommender features; offer alternatives for failed searches, such as with spelling errors; and find new ways to navigate large sets of search results.

The report also identifies library projects and technology that exemplify progress, among them OCLC's Fiction Finder Project, RLG's RedLightGreen, ProQuest's Smart Search, Elsevier's Scopus, Talis's Whisper, and Endeca's ProFind™ (see below).

New NCSU catalog

North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries, deploying the Endeca ProFind™ platform, 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 (see www.lib.ncsu.edu/catalog).

Endeca's technology is used in TLC's CARL•X library system, which has been installed in a few public libraries, but NCSU worked directly with the company, which mainly sells to retailers.

More relevance

Andrew Pace, NCSU's head of systems and known for his colorful denunciations of OPACs, told LJ, “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.”

Previously, the system had to be down for three days to reindex the library's keyword index of 1.5 million bibliographic records. “Endeca does that in about four hours.” Pace added, “I almost hope it's met with deafening silence from the users,” Pace added. “It's about time it made more sense. Nobody calls up Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart and asks them how to do a search.”