CiL2008: Next Generation Library Interfaces

You can find the Powerpoint slides presented at this session on the Library Technology Guides website.

This session ended up slightly different from what I interpreted the description in the program book to mean. It said "New models of what constitutes a library catalog are forming, and products are now beginning to embody aspects of this new vision. Breeding provides an overview of the library catalogs and interfaces now available or in development, including both commercial and open source alternatives." He did talk about the products, but at the end of the presentation. The majority involved the new model and what it should incorporate, most of which seemed like "Well, duh" information to me.

This was the session where I started thinking about the discrepancy in the stats that the University of Guelph, ProQuest, and the Pew Institute reported, of how students turned to the library for research, and the stats that others, including Breeding, cited that said people turned first to Google. I'd need to know more details about the studies that found people preferred Google - who were the patrons? what sort of information were they looking for? did they have access to university-level information resources? what's their education level? - before I could say who was right and who wasn't, or even if both were right depending on the circumstances.

And that was the point where I made a note to myself to propose a survey that asks our students where they go to research, and that makes a difference between quick lookups and in-depth research, so we can find out what our students are doing and how we can help them.

Breeding proposes a comprehensive search service. This is not a federated search, but a collection of metadata from all types of sources that could be searched. He acknowledges that there are a lot of cooperation problems involved, but patrons hate having to sign in to a number of different resources just to do one search.

This was the point where I made a note to investigate if it was possible to create a single sign-in for off-campus users that would persist through one session using different databases, because I know how annoying it is to have to sign in to every database you use. Although I suspect it's probably quite difficult, otherwise we'd have done it already.

I stopped making notes at this point, as his Powerpoint slides were pretty comprehensive, so shall refer you to them if you're interested in theoretical design of future catalogs, and what products are supplying some of this functionality already.