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21 March 2007
Report from Library of Congress meeting acknowledges the 'consumer space'
Posted by Paul Miller at March 21, 2007 11:04 AM
Lorcan points me to Nancy Fallgren's report on the recent Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control meeting at Google. I blogged about the meeting just before it took place.
I was pleased to see explicit recognition of the (competing?) requirements for using bibliographic data in the 'consumer environment' and the 'management environment.' I was more pleased to see tacit acknowledgement that the OPAC is an increasingly small part of the 'consumer environment' for bibliographic data.
“The consumer environment is comprised of end-users searching for information resources. These consumers require bibliographic data to assist them in finding, identifying, selecting and obtaining information resources, in English as well as other languages. Both Markey and Burke reveal that users need additional/ richer data and that the bibliographic catalog is merely one of many sources they use to find information. In addition to multiple sources of information, there are multiple access tools for information discovery. End-users employ a variety of general purpose and custom tools to find relevant information. The tools range from general search engines that use keyword as the access methodology to more specialized systems customized for the library environment, such as faceted browser interfaces. In addition, discussions about and designs for bibliographic data must not be couched only in terms of effectiveness in English-language searches and structures.”
So what do we do about it, then? How do we evolve, to effectively insert bibliographic (and other) data into the flow, instead of locking it up in increasingly fancy silos?
Even more importantly, we learn that Google has cool toilets.
Technorati Tags: Google, Libraries, OCLC, OPAC, open data, Talis
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