The future of the catalogue

Warwick Cathro

Assistant Director-General, Innovation

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”

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)”

Alternative discovery pathways Examples:

– Google– Amazon– Libraries Australia

The local library system and its data is still relevant

A paradox “Libraries enable unmediated access to the

world’s 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

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”

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

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

NLA’s 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

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 catalogue’s

functionality We can enhance the user’s experience through

integration with other discovery services

Using Libraries Australia: Inhibitors

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

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

Requesting the resource

Need for a simple, stateless protocol Web Service OpenURL

Potential for user confusion

Scope of their search Difficulty in navigating results in the union

catalogue– Quality control– Clustering of result sets

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

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

The future [2] Improve presentation of results sets in the

union catalogue:– relevance ranking– result clustering

Improve quality of data in union catalogue

Conclusion The NLA has identified a case for a medium

term project to change the way that users search the NLA collection and the nation’s collections