ER&L 2008: Opening Keynote

Karen Coyle - Digital library consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net

"There's no catalog...
...like no catalog"

Where are we going with library catalogs and library cataloging?
OCLC's library perceptions study - 2% of searches start with the library web site; everything else starts outside the library. Maybe that's okay? Maybe it's not, but we need to think about how we want our catalogs to behave.

Showing/analyzing a "typical" undergraduate search for a thing - in this case, Lolita - traced through Google to Wikipedia, Amazon, LibraryThing, and WorldCat.
What is the deal with these sources?
-All link to and from information in as many ways as possible; allow user participation, etc.
When user arrives at library catalog, it tells whether or not the item is there - it's giving users the information they came to the catalog for. So our current catalogs are doing their jobs, but are we selling ourselves short? This is a very narrow view of information - library hands the information to the user and the transaction is over.

Shows a much more complicated matrix of information-seeking behaviors that use bibliographic information - beyond laying hands on the item, we've washed our hands of the these behaviors.
Argument against working the way Google or Amazon does is that libraries only have their bibliographic data - she argues that if mined properly and viewed collectively, bibliographic data is very rich and interesting. Shows WorldCat Identities page on Nabokov as proof.

Why do we have such a hard time with this Google-like connectivity?
It's the difference between being "on the network" and "in the network" -
"on the network" - there's a gateway to the information - it's locked into the catalog or database.
"in the network" - information is sprinkled throughout the network, with no access gateway -
cites the Open Library Project (one web page per book; now working on one web page per author) - the library is linked into the Google-Amazon-Wikipedia-etc link stream.

NextGen Catalog(ing):
-web-ify library data - available for APIs, mashups, etc
-make library data available to online services (it's time for the child to leave home)
-allow re-use of library bibliographic data (many people are making things out of bibliographic data who have no idea how library bib. data could help them)
-take library data to the user

Projects on NextGen Cataloging:
Joint Steering Committee for Resource Description and Access
Library of Congress Report on the Future of Bibliographic Control
Dublin Core/RDA Task Force