Online Catalogs

In my first article in this series, I wrassled with the biggest bear in the forest: how most online catalogs lack relevance ranking. That's one big hairy bear, but as some readers pointed out, it's a little forced to pick on relevance ranking, out of the context of all the other important features most online catalogs don't offer—or are features implemented so badly that librarians disable these features rather than further confuse the poor user, who just wants to find a book or DVD, for crying out loud.
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Lee Rainie from the Pew Internet and American Life Project gave Friday's keynote address. He's a very lively speaker—mentally I started referring to him as Peppie le Pew—and he has lots of data and facts about how Millenials (those born between 1982 and 2000) think, use the Internet, search for information, communicate and form communities, and believe in themselves and the technologically and media rich lives they lead. If Stephen Abram wants facts, Peppie has 'em.

Rainie organized his talk around eight key realities of the Millennial generation: Read More »

I recently wrote about NCSU adding a search engine to its online catalog. But after talking to librarians who asked me, “So what did they get for doing that?” I realized I need to back-pedal and explain how a search engine makes an online catalog easier to use (or, as Andrew Pace puts it, "Why OPACs Suck").

Cream Rising to the Top
I'll start today with relevance ranking—the building block of search, found in any search engine, from Google to Amazon to Internet Movie Database to little old Librarians' Internet Index. Read More »

It was exciting to read Teresa's post about the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries' catalog. This achievement represents a magnificent step forward for integrated library systems, and the NCSU Libraries catalog's rich combination of search and browse, combined with its powerful search engine, stand in silent rebuke to the piteously clunky library systems most libraries pay dearly for because we've never insisted that the catalog could be better than that. Read More »

If you attended LITA's Forum in San Jose last September, you may have heard this analogy: "Making minor changes to library catalog systems is like putting lipstick on a pig."
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