The future of the catalogue

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The future of the catalogue

• Warwick Cathro
• Assistant Director-General, Innovation

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Calhoun report 1

• Today, a large and growing number of students
  and scholars routinely bypass library catalogs in
  favor of other discovery tools
• The catalog is in decline, its processes and
  structures are unsustainable, and change needs to
  be swift

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Calhoun report 2

• Build the necessary infrastructure to permit
  global discovery and delivery of information
  among open, loosely-coupled systems (e.g., find
  it on Google, get it from your library)

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Alternative discovery pathways

• Examples
• Google
• Amazon
• Libraries Australia
• The local library system and its data is still
  relevant

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A paradox

• Libraries enable unmediated access to the
  worlds journal literature through indexes and
  databases but give priority to their own
  collections when it comes to the discovery and
  delivery of books and other non-serial items
• - Judith Pearce. New Frameworks for Resource
  Discovery and Delivery http//www.nla.gov.au/nla/
  staffpaper/2005/pearce1.html

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Union catalogues

• Union catalogues are still a missing part of
  the service framework. In order to realise the
  benefits of the significant investment libraries
  have made in these tools over the years, they
  need to be promoted as a primary means of access
  to wanted resources in library collections

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The long tail

• Unlimited selection is revealing truths about
  what consumers want .... People are going deep
  into the catalog and the more they find, the
  more they like. As they wander further from the
  beaten path, they discover their taste is not as
  mainstream as they thought
• - Chris Anderson. The long tail. Wired
  magazine

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Union catalogues 2

• Fewer but larger pools of metadata to support
  discovery would help
• - Lorcan Dempsey, D-Lib, April 2006
• Research libraries and their partners will
  deploy shared catalogs as a key component of
  providing affordable global access to larger,
  richer collections than any single institution
  could house locally
• - Karen Calhoun

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NLAs assumptions

• We will continue to use our ILMS
• Users should be able to find all relevant
  resources that they are able to access
• Users need to be fully aware of what they are
  searching
• We need to offer users a primary or default
  search target
• Most users prefer a simple (Google-like) search
  interface
• Users need an easy requesting interface with
  follow-up capability

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Using Libraries Australia enablers

• Users would access a wider pool of library
  resources
• Our union catalogue is now a free search target
• All records in our local catalogue are in the
  union catalogue
• The union catalogue now has better functionality
• We have power to improve the union catalogues
  functionality
• We can enhance the users experience through
  integration with other discovery services

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Using Libraries Australia Inhibitors

• Links to the local system
• Potential for user confusion
• Data missing from the union catalogue

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Links to the local system

• Deep links
• significant effort to maintain
• ugly interface transition
• link relies on deprecated Z39.50 OPAC schema
• Web Services protocol
• Z39.50 Holdings Schema
• Or XML Holdings Schema

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Requesting the resource

• Need for a simple, stateless protocol
• Web Service
• OpenURL

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Potential for user confusion

• Scope of their search
• Difficulty in navigating results in the union
  catalogue
• Quality control
• Clustering of result sets

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Data missing from the union catalogue

• Copy-specific information
• Local information about formed collections
• Links to record sets
• Linking URLs may not be permitted in union
  catalogues

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The future 1

• Progress standards process
• Analyse incorporation of institution specific
  data in union catalogue
• Examine use of access controls for links to
  record sets
• Changes to our web site

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The future 2

• Improve presentation of results sets in the union
  catalogue
• relevance ranking
• result clustering
• Improve quality of data in union catalogue

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Conclusion

• The NLA has identified a case for a medium term
  project to change the way that users search the
  NLA collection and the nations collections