The Geek in Me

Cataloging is by no means my forte in the professional world of librarianship.  Yet, I've been doing a lot of stuff related to cataloging for what seems ages now.  As our library staff continues to seek a replacement system for our current ILS, the word Catalog captures my attention more and more.

Thus this article about the usefulness of the online catalog caught my eye.  http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january07/markey/01markey.html.  (I do have hope for myself I could not make it all the way through the article in one try.)  Those dedicated catalogers that make my life easy, I admire you.  However a few things did strike me as relevant in this article.

I too get frustrated with the searching in an OPAC.  I want to find information but when I use, say, a public library OPAC, the results I receive are not what I expected more often than not.  I truly expect when I search for an author, to retrieve works by that author and only that author.  My frustration is multplied when a title search is performed and I get crap results.  That's when I become the nightmare Library Patron.  I go to the desk and demand that the staff find what I want.  Odd, I use electronic databases remotely often, but rarely do I use the public libray OPAC remotely.

Is the OPAC past its prime? Should we be considering a replacement/upgrade/enhancement to the ILS or should we really think of revolutionary solutions that deliver information rather than providing a search mechanism that generally frustrates?  Are ILS systems for the staff or the user?