IL2006 Day 1: Perfuming a Skunk, or there’s More than One Way to Skin an Online Catalog
Posted on October 24, 2006
Filed Under Technology Planning |
Nanette… Champaign Public Library
First step: user survey on the website
- what do you currently use
- What types of enhancements would they like to see?
- etc
Results? most came to use the online catalog, many ONLY came to use catalog - and many thought it was clunky.
Goal setting:
- integrate online catalog into website
- focus on ease of use
planning:
- study what other libraries have done to make online catalogts more attractrive and usable
- talk to the administrators of catalog to see what can be done without affecting others in consortium
- investigate third-party solutions like aquabrowsers, endeca
- work with automation staff
- consider public service straff opinions
- prioritize features into must-haves and can-wait-for-phase-two features
finally in planning:
- we dreamed big
- they didn’t want to dismiss anything…
- they had a grant, so they had money…
implementation -
- roadblocks - ILS vendor was upgrading
- Vendor was unwilling to provide API
- consortial concerns
- time concerns
Online Catalog 2.0: where do we go from here
- what can libraries do? Hire programmers.
- support vendors who are willing to release the API for their software and support third-party development of enhancements - or go open source
- Insist on features that our power users want - these are the fetures your power user will want two years from now
What ILS vendors can do?
- anticipate user’s needs
- look at what libraries are doing with your products - implement some of their innovations
- understand that no company can do it all and well. Release your API - even Microsoft is doing it
what catalogers can do?
- competition with google, amazon, etc is good
- understand that user tagging is not the end of controlled vocabularies
- provide adequate subject access for all types of materials in all formats
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