Innovative Interfaces: making the most of the data we have
On Friday I presented at VLA’s (Vermont Library Association) College and Special Libraries meeting. I had contacted Meredith before putting together the final version of my presentation, and I think we managed to complement each other rather than repeat each other. I ended up speaking quite a bit about library OPACs and the need for change in both the interface and the back-end technology. I did not talk much about what I see as a need for a change in cataloging practices, because I feel like I’m on shaky ground with that topic, although I did talk about LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings) and how they could be made more useful by being able to use them as both pre and post-coordinated topics, which could allow users to “walk” back up the path of a pre-coordinated heading to steadily broaden their results. I also discussed at the end of the presentation, how libraries need to embrace a culture of change in order to stay relevant in today’s information society.
All-in-all I think the presentation was well received, and sparked some interesting discussions. I’ve posted my slides here. If you want to learn more, here are a few places you could get started:
- LITA blog - Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse
- Casey Bisson - Presentation: Faceted Searching and Browsing in Scriblio
- Jennifer Lang - ALA Annual 2007: ALCTS President’s Program
- Library Juice - Why Web 2.0 is leading back to full cataloging
- Karen Calhoun - The Changing Nature of the Catalog and its Integration with Other Discovery Tools
- Roy Tennant - Life Beyond MARC: the Case for Revolutionary Change in Library Systems and Services Webcast
- Karen Schneider – How OPACs Suck, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
- Eric Lease Morgan - A “Next generation” library catalog
- Jennifer Macaulay – OPAC Blog Posts – A list
- List of presentations on Endeca at NCSU
- Publications about Flamenco
- The University of California Libraries - Final Report: December 2005: Bibliographic Services Task Force: Executive Summary
July 24, 2007 at 3:54 pm
It’s always hard to extract what someone said from PowerPoint slides, but even based on that slim evidence it looks like you did a great job. Lots of good information and examples about where we have been failing and where we can (and are) doing better. I wish I had been there to hear it!
July 24, 2007 at 5:38 pm
Thanks Roy. I think the best part of doing this presentation was being forced to take some time to leave my digital library bubble and really explore the other library issues. Although the CDI faces a lot of the same issues (particularly since we are borrowing catalogers to do metadata work) it is easy for me to effect change in my small environment. It was good to really look at the challenges facing libraries as a whole and thinking about how we really can start to change, and to be able to stress how important change is going to be to us.
July 30, 2007 at 8:50 pm
[...] Section. Meredith Farkas gave a presentation called Social Software in Libraries. My colleague Winona Salesky gave a presentation about using metadata to improve user interfaces. Winona spoke about faceted [...]