Page 190 - DLIS002_KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION CLASSIFICATION AND CATALOGUING THEORY

Unit 9: Physical Forms and Types of Library Catalogues

15. The alphabetical arrangement of entries in one sequence is at once the strength and Notes
weakness of a dictionary catalogue.

Case Study User Experience in the Library

urrent systems in libraries fall short when the user experience that they provide is
compared with that of popular services on the Web. However, libraries are better
Cequipped to satisfy user needs when it comes to other criteria, such as the quality
and relevance of their collections, the rich metadata they offer for accurate searching, the
services they can tailor for their users, and the control over the overall workflow,
terminology, and look and feel of their application. By leveraging their unique qualities
and providing a better user experience, libraries are likely to offer discovery and delivery
services that will best suit the users’ expectations and needs.
Implementing new end-user interfaces for systems in the library is not a simple task and
cannot be successfully achieved by only making improvements to current interfaces. The
first problem is that today’s library systems are inherently librarian centric; their design
in terms of data structures and workflows is focused on library administration and hence
severely limits the possibilities for the end-user interface. Second, existing library
collections are fragmented, offered by multiple library systems, each of which focuses on
specific types of materials – physical items, locally digitized materials, remote e-journal
collections, or others. Hence, libraries cannot present a unified entry point to their many
types of offerings, unless an interface that overarches the multiple library collections is
implemented.
Several stakeholders – libraries and vendors – have embarked on a path toward creating
a better user experience (see Sadeh, 2007). The library solutions deriving from this new
path are based on “decoupled” architectures: whereas existing systems in the library, such
as the integrated library system and digital asset management system, will continue to
serve librarians as management tools, the user-experience layer is developed as a separate
platform. In a recent posting on his blog, Lorcan Dempsey explains that “the discovery
experience does not have to be tied to the inventory management system… Discovery of
the catalogued collection will be increasingly disembedded, or lifted out, from the ILS
system, and re-embedded in a variety of other contexts” Several stakeholders – libraries
and vendors – have embarked on a path toward creating a better user experience (see
Sadeh, 2007). The library solutions deriving from this new path are based on “decoupled”
architectures: whereas existing systems in the library, such as the integrated library system
and digital asset management system, will continue to serve librarians as management
tools, the user-experience layer is developed as a separate platform. In a recent posting on
his blog, Lorcan Dempsey explains that “the discovery experience does not have to be tied
to the inventory management system… Discovery of the catalogued collection will be
increasingly disembedded, or lifted out, from the ILS system, and re-embedded in a variety
of other contexts”.
This decoupling not only provides the capability to create a better user experience for a
given collection but also unifies the discovery processes across heterogeneous collections.
The new solutions can harvest data from multiple repositories and create a single index.
As Dempsey puts it, “…there will be a growing desire to hide boundaries between databases
(A&I, catalogue, repositories, etc.) in some cases – especially where those boundaries are
seen more to reflect the historical contingencies of library organization or the business
Contd....

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