Library Catalogs: The Wrong Solution. By Roy Tennant, in Library Journal.Pick a popular book and pretend you are a library patron. Choose three to five libraries at random from the lib-web-cats site (pick catalogs that are not using your system) and attempt to find your book. Try as much as possible to see the system through the eyes of your patrons[~]a teenager, a retiree, or an older faculty member. You may not always like what you see. Now go back to your own system and try the same thing.What should the public see?Our users deserve an information system that helps them find all different kinds of resources[~]books, articles, web pages, working papers in institutional repositories[~]and gives them the tools to focus in on what they want. This is not, and should not be, the library catalog. It must communicate with the catalog, but it will also need to interface with other information systems, such as vendor databases and web search engines. [News Is Free: Popular Items] [A blog doesn't need a clever name]My library (specifically, the consortium of which my library is a member) is in the process of cataloguing its ejournals. My tentative definition of ejournals are those journal articles which can be accessed in full-text via the databases which the library subscribes to, whether or not the library holds a print copy of the ejournal. It's my library's task to catalogue its collection of Hein-On-Line journals. The reason why we want these ejournals in the catalog is so that people can find them and access them. This is especially so when we don't hold the print version. In the meantime, we provide access via Serial Solutions. They provide us with a list of which particular ejournals can be accessed in the library, including the coverage dates and information like that. This information goes onto our website. I wonder if we will maintain our subscription to Serials Solutions once our ejournals can be found in the catalogue. I would hope so - although this may be very unrealistic in this year of library budget cutting. I agree with the above author that despite our best efforts, library online catalogues are not the easiest things in the world to use. That's why we need to give people other options for their searching. The library catalogue is, in a sense, a remnant of the unexploded library - a small area where the information has been ordered and arranged in a logical and systematic way. The trouble is that many people are used to the new combinations offered in the exploded library, and find the method underlying the traditional library catalogue to be foreign. The biggest change is that now library users/patrons are beginning to have a choice as to whether they will use our systems or not. In the law library, the obvious alternatives are Westlaw and Lexis, with their full-text coverage, sophisticated searching capacities, extensive marketing & research & development budgets, not to mention their online & phone help. Already, many law students do research assignments relying on these services exclusively. Librarians could mention many reasons why this is not such a good idea, but that's not going to stop them, or prevent more from following in their footsteps. I wonder how many of our students will use our catalog to access our Hein-On-Line ejournals when they can just go into Westlaw's JLR database - even if Hein-On-Line offers broader & cheaper coverage in many respects.
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