Fetch Booboo, Fetch!

K. Antelman, E. Lynema, A.K. Pace (2006). “Toward a Twenty-First Century Library Catalog.” Information Technology & Libraries, 25:3. 128-139.

In their article on North Carolina State University’s purchase and implementation of the Endeca Information Access Platform, Antelman, Lynema and Pace (2006) discuss the history of library catalogs, and how North Carolina State University is leading the way towards a third generation of card catalogs. Historically, online catalogs developed from the physical card catalog system, and thus provided similar access points as the card catalog in the first generation of catalogs, developed in the 1960s and 1970s. In the second generation of catalogs, keyword searches became more popular, and provided a new ease of use not seen before. The authors of this article discuss in detail the implementation of the Endeca Information Access Platform at North Carolina State University. This system has a number of 3rd generation catalog features, including related record search and browse and integration of keyword, controlled vocabulary, and classification-based approaches,” though it is clear that there is still a distance to go before online catalogs like this can be end-user focused.
There were a couple of things that really stood out to me while reading this article, including how quickly the NCSU team was able to implement Endeca, how intentional they were in modifying the platform to their own language, and style, and the assessment that they conducted constantly though the course of implementation. I was struck by how the team started with five outcomes they wanted to achieve, and were intentional in assessing those outcomes over the course of several months after implementation. I would l have liked, in this article, to see more comparison to the platforms used by large book changes, like Barnes and Noble, or Borders. I believe those systems are what end-users are very comfortable with, and I would have liked to have seen how the Endeca platform held up against those systems. This leads me to my question: What assessments have been done on the platforms used by large booksellers, should those platforms be implemented in libraries, what unintentional weaknesses would that present?

C.N. Mooers (1960). “Mooers’ Law or, Why Some Retrival Systems Are Used and Others Are Not.” Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 1996 vol: 23 iss:1
What a fascinating article! Rather, what fascinating remarks by Mr. Mooers! I vehemently disagree with his statements in current every day society, but I am getting ahead of myself. First let me summarize what Mr. Mooers argued in his remarks during a panel discussion at the Annual Meeting of the American Documentation Institute at Lehigh University in 1959. Mr. Mooers stated that people will avoid using a retrieval system (specifically in Libraries) when it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to having information than to not have it. He believes this statement to be true, because in practice librarians have found that in many situations retrieval systems that are technically poor see a lot more use than other systems which are technically superior.
While I do understand Mr. Mooers point of view, I can’t begin to find it relevant in today’s society. Children today are being born into a society where they are trained from birth to filter the plethora of information thrown at them from every angle possible. I believe the millennials of today are rather more comfortable with too much information. Take for example the fact that there are so many search engines available, google, yahoo, bing, and then tell me that people today are not more comfortable with an overabundance of information. Furthermore, the first article for this assignment Antelman, Lynema and Pace (2006), argue that many people want to believe in serendipity when picking books, Endeca’s platform allows users to see other items that may be of interest to the searcher, again an overabundance of information for the user, and something they prefer. Finally, I look to a number of the social networking site available to the general population, where we are constantly fed updates on what others are doing, this to me clearly states that while Mooers’ Law may have been relevant in the 1950s, it is no longer relevant in today’s society. What I will agree with is that people will always seek the least painful and troublesome route to get to an end result, but most would not classify too much information as either painful or troublesome. My discussion question for this article would be how can we make library card catalogs both easy to use and full of information, does it mean that we should look to commercial sites for our own development, or should we create something using a consortium of librarians?