The Future of the Library Catalog: Open, Interactive,Participatory

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The Future of the Library Catalog Open, I
nteractive, Participatory

• T. Hickey
• FEDLINK Fall Membership Meeting
• 2005 November 9

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OCLC Research

• Research for both
• OCLC services
• Membership
• Metadata management
• Knowledge organization
• Content management
• Interoperability
• Systems interaction design
• 30 employees

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Go to the Users

• Make WorldCat harvestable
• Google
• Yahoo
• Toolbars
• Available on the open Web

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Make WorldCat Participatory
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Basic Approach

• Go to the users
• Bring data to the user
• Make it as inviting as possible
• Invite their participation
• Use the data we have
• Classification
• Controlled vocabularies
• Controlled names
• FRBR

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Dewey Browser

• Use classification information
• Dewey gives a hierarchical browse capability
• Familiar, easy
• Search used to refine beyond top three levels
• Skip Swedish
• Skip DDC Browser

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Opening Dewey
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Fiction Subset

• 2,665,662 WorldCat records
• 1,758,479 work sets
• 1.5 records/set
• 3,866 sets have 20 records or more
• 50,540 sets have 5 records or more

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FictionFinder

• Brings together expressions and manifestations
  for a given work for 2.6 million bibliographic
  records for fiction
• The records are grouped at the work level using
  the OCLC FRBR Work-Set Algorithm
• Uses existing bibliographic, authority, and
  holdings information

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Family of Works
Original
Russian Translation
Pop-up book
Annotated edition
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Curiouser

• Try to making the best use of data about items in
  WorldCat
• A user interface for exploring and selecting
  works and items
• The prototype interface
• integrates techniques for display and navigation
  of records in a FRBR context,
• exploits structured data in bibliographic,
  authority, and holdings records,
• explores Web services and other data sources to
  enhance the utility of Open WorldCat

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Live Search

• Extract common phrases
• Author
• Title
• Statement of responsibility
• Subjects
• Do displays when user pauses
• Links are into Open WorldCat

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Plans, etc.

• DDC Browser has three collections
• Revised version of FictionFinder this fall
• Working on Curiouser
• Adding Wiki to DDC Browser
• Open WorldCat improvements

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Do We Need It?

• Just have Google harvest everything
• Our experience with Google
• Fielded searching
• Reliable searching
• Possibility of user-supplied metadata
• Cost of good metadata
• Cost of non-existent metadata

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Conclusions

• Shift to remote users forces new approaches
• Online availability trend towards
  centralization
• More flexibility in implementations
• Patrons are better served
• Less emphasis on physical collections

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Thomas Hickey
hickey_at_oclc.org