Comments on: Academic Librarianship’s Future Strengths?

By: Librarianship’s Future Strengths: Are OPACs Broken? « The Cataloguing Librarian

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:09:53 +0000

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By: Claire Stewart

Claire Stewart — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 02:53:06 +0000

I think your citation observation is spot on; personally I’m also hopeful that our definition of a citation becomes a lot broader, and will do media formats just as well as it will do book and journal references. It might even become tough to distinguish between a citation management tool and a personal (digital) information management tool.

By: Barbara

Barbara — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:09:09 +0000

Interesting comment, Steven – given your interest in “simplicity v. complexity” issues.

The OPAC is not terribly broken for the expert who already has identified a source by other means and simply needs to know if it’s owned and if so, where it is. But … isn’t a huge point of the OPAC that it should help us identify books we don’t know about? The OPAC that works would be one that helps people do that without making them learn the secret handshake and today’s colors. The perfect OPAC would make complex searching simple. Not cluttering things up with “here are more bells to ring if you know how, more whistles to blow if you have lots of time to try them all out” but responding to a “simple” request with a well-organized set of options.

The complexity should be at our end, not the users’.

By: stevenb

stevenb — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 15:56:43 +0000

Is the OPAC broken? By whose standards? Seth Godin has a great video presentation from GEL 2006 where he riffs on “It’s Broken” and the first thing he says is “for anything someone says ‘is broken’, someone else will say ‘I don’t think it’s broken’ “- and he makes a great point. It really depends who’s using the OPAC. For the 80% of our users who just want to type an author’s name or a book title, they find what they want and go to the shelf and (hopefully) get it. For those folks, the OPAC is not broken. Sure, some will disregard screen information about a book having a due date or “missing” status. Can those messages be made any more obvious? I don’t know. Do they need a faceted search or feeds? No. I’ve gone on record previously to say we do need to improve the OPAC by giving users a powerful, functional discovery tool – which your vision of the OPAC would provide – but that for the majority of the users, we just need to keep it basic.

Where is the OPAC really broken? Good luck if you need to find journal issues and there is even the slightest complication. But you make a good point. If we are the ones saying “It’s not broken” without really understand what the users want to do when it comes to searching for books, journals, etc – we do so at our own peril. On the other hand, if we say “this is what an OPAC needs to deliver a great user experience every time” – and we do so without really understand what the users want – that might be just as shortsighted.

And as far as citation madness goes I refer you and others to this WSJ article “Bibliography Mess: The Internet Wreaks Havoc With the Form — How Do You Cite a Web Page? That’s a Matter of Debate; Arguing Over a Period” (5/2/02). If we could just agree on one simple citation style for each different format we might not even need all these different pieces of software. I don’t foresee an end to the mess anytime soon, much to the detriment of – well, everyone. This stuff is really broken.