Library catalogues, search systems and data

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 12:34:29 +0000

Below is an email I sent to UK Library e-resources mailing list (lis-e-resources@jiscmail.ac.uk). I’m putting it here for the same reason then I sent the original email: I think there are questions relating to the changing role of the library catalogue and new models are developing in how and where metadata exists for the items libraries provide access to.

My points in a nutshell:

The way we work with Library system (LMS) catalogues is changing, with the need to import and export large batches of records from other systems increasing, especially with online materials such as journals and e-books. This is quite a different need to those before the web, when item = physical thing in the library building, records were added one at a time, with
Library systems have not adapted to this new need, and though technically possible is often fiddly and can feel like a hack.
While it is possible to import batches of records, there are issues regarding keeping everything in sync. For example, Libraries often subscribe to publisher (online) ‘journal bundles’, the titles included in these bundles can change over time, but how to easily update/sync the catalogue to reflect this. One option is to regularly delete the imported records and reimport from the data source completely, though, if I understand correctly, Library Systems often do not delete records, but instead simple ‘suppress’ from the public view. So doing this for twenty thousand e-journal records each month would leave 240,000 hidden records on the system each year!
Why do we want them on the catalogue? Because users search the web interface to the catalogue to look for journals, books, theses etc. So we need to ensure our e-journals, e-books etc can be discovered via the catalogue interface.
A Library System (LMS) will typically have a catalogue, which cataloguers and other library staff maintain, and a public web front end for users to search (and locate) items.
However, ‘next generation’ of web search systems are now on the market, these allow the user to search the LMS catalogue and other data sources simultaneously in one modern interface.
Setting up these systems to search other data sources (in addition to the library system catalogue) so that they include records for online journals and e-books (and more) is a much neater solution, then trying to add/sync complete cataloging records in to the library system catalogue.
This to me (and I’m no scholar on the subject) has changed the model. The Library System catalogue was one and the same as the public web catalogue. What was on one was on the other. Librarians would discuss ‘should we put X on to the catalogue?’. But now these two entities are separate. Do we want something to be discoverable on our web catalogue search system, Do we want a record on our back-end library System for something? These are two separate questions, and it is possible to have an item on one and not the other. It would be easy to say that if you just want users to be able to discover a set of items, just make them available on your next generation search systems if it wasn’t for the fact that…
Third party systems can cross search or import records from multiple library catalogues, getting data from their library system. This was a simple thing to consider: do we want to allow these systems to have access to our records/holdings, and if so they would search our catalogue. These are examples and not the only things to consider, for example Endnote allows you to search a library catalogue within the application, of course this is the Library System catalogue.
This creates questions: which items do we want to make available to our users searching our web catalogue? which items do we want to expose to other systems out there? What items do we want to keep in our Library system back-end catalogue for administrative/inventory purposes? With the old simpler model these questions did not need to be asked.

I’ve drawn some rather embarrassingly bad diagrams to try and illustrate the point:

Library2.0 on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

Library catalogues, search systems and data