Lorcan Dempsey has posted on What is the Catalog?, and also refers to is unhappiness at the word ‘Catalogue’ in his recent Ariadne piece.

This is an interesting intersection with the recent presentations I attended at IGeLU on ‘Libraries, OPACs and a changing discovery landsacpe’. Both speakers talked about the fact that the traditional view of the library catalogue as the ‘centre’ of the library users information discovery behaviour was no longer valid in the modern environment. One of the questions in the discussion that followed these talks was ‘What do you mean by the library catalogue?’

The ideas that started to emerge out of these talks was that libraries would need to focus more on ‘local’ or ‘unique’ collections that they had stewardship of, rather than trying to catalogue the whole world (the problem is not building the Alexandrian library, but trying to do it thousands of times over?).

I remember having a discussion of what should and shouldn’t be in the catalogue about 5 years ago with a colleague, in the context of the growing number of electronic resources we were subscribing to. Currently what we refer to as our ‘library catalogue’ (when talking to our users) contains:

• a record of our physical stock (or at least aims to – there is a fair amount of error here)
• our e-journal titles (paid for and free, aggregations and individual titles, actually imported on a monthly basis from our SFX installation)
• some, but not all, e-books we pay for access to (e.g. we don’t load individual MARC records for books in EEBO or ECO, but we do for Oxford Reference; we don’t track books available in aggregated databases such as Business Source Premier; we don’t load Project Gutenberg details)
• some digital objects (online exam papers where available)

This odd mixture has some logic behind it (I won’t go into it here, but we do actually discuss this stuff and make decisions about what goes on in a very general way, if not for specific items), but it seems inevitable that there is no obvious consistency for the library user about what they should or should not expect to find if they search the catalogue.

 

So, if the catalogue is not a list of what we have physically, or what we provide access to physically and virtually, what does it become? My guess is that we are heading towards realigning the ‘catalogue’ towards the physical collection – i.e. this is what we have in the building. This is essentially where we started. We can expect our users to start in a wider world of information, and only reach the ‘catalogue’ when they get close to the ‘delivery’ phase.

If this is the case, what will it mean to the development of the catalogue. Definitely integration of inventory information with the wider world – if the user starts with a ‘big picture’ they will want to narrow it down to stuff they can get their hands on pretty quickly (just today I was frustrated in my local library not being able to narrow my search to ‘this branch, on the shelf, only’). Perhaps a focus on finding the item on the shelf – on a recent visit to Seattle, I was impressed how the layout of the non-fiction stock in the library (in a continuous dewey sequence covering several sloping floors – so you can walk continuously from 001 to 999 without any stairs etc.) made it easy to navigate the stock – especially liking the floor tiles with the dewey numbers on them for instant orientation.

This needs more thought, so hopefully I can come back to it in a future post…