Cataloging and Beyond: The Year of Cataloging Research

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From Monday’s Cognotes - by Megan Hodge, University of North Texas:

Moderated and organized by Allyson Carlyle of the University of Washington’s iSchool, this Sunday panel brought together four experts on current cataloging trends in order to provide research ideas for what ALCTS has dubbed the Year of Cataloging Research.

First panelist Sara Shatford Layne, UCLA, provided a theoretical background and explained that for the purposes of this panel, the term “cataloging” covers cataloging, classification, and metadata creation. Cataloging research attempts to measure the effectiveness of the connection between user and bibliographic record. She noted that catalogers wish that research could answer the question, “Is what I’m doing useful?” or “What should we be doing differently?”, but that usefulness is not a measurable concept. Researchers can measure use and can measure what users say, but questions that can be easily answered by studies are not necessarily worth doing research on.

Lynn Silipigni Connaway of OCLC stated that users want the catalog/ database search to be “as easy as Google Book Search.” She performed a literature review on the digital information seeker, analyzing twelve user studies published in the U.S./ UK over the last five years, in order to determine what the researcher today looks like. While the results were inconclusive, she commented on a few trends: users want things easy (they prefer basic search) and on their desktop. They view only a few pages of an ebook at a time, which leads her to believe that ebooks are the future of ready reference. Users are not as concerned with information overload in the form of thousands of retrieved database results; their problems arise from trying to access the information they have found; they desire more full-text results to be available from the catalog. Information seekers use search engines to perform quick searches to become familiar with a topic and want library catalogs to be just as natural-language-friendly. Results should be obviously relevant and the criteria used to determine relevancy should be made known to users. If a needed book or article is not owned by the user’s library, the patron wants to know where s/he can get it.

Jane Greenberg, UNC Chapel Hill, said that there is currently a metadata bottleneck (a term she borrowed from Liddy) and that automated metadata generation is now necessary because traditional, manual cataloging approaches are costly and too slow to keep up with current trends in cataloging and user behavior. Catalogers should work on improving search algorithms; while ontologies work well in the sciences, they are not as effective in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Genre/content-driven keyword generation would be helpful in these disciplines. Content creators have been creating metadata for a long time and will continue to do so: catalogers should utilize these subject specialists and help them do it better.

Amy Eklund of Georgia Perimeter College wants to know what the next generation catalog will look like, and advises subscribing to the NGC4Lib listserv in order to participate in its ongoing discussion. She asks, “Are there things that users expect nextgen catalogs to do that they don’t?” She suggests observing users’ behavior to reveal their hidden agendas.