Last Friday, March 27, I was invited by Michael Witt (Interdisciplinary Research Librarian) at Purdue University to give a presentation to the library faculty on the topic of “next generation” library catalogs. During the presentation I made an effort to have the participants ask and answer questions such as “What is the catalog?”, “What is it expected to contain?”, “What functions is it expected to perform and for whom?”, and most importantly, “What problems is it expected to solve?”
I then described how most of the current “next generation” library catalog thingees are very similar. Acquire metadata records. Optionally store them in a database. Index them (with Lucene). Provide services against the index (search and browse). I then brought the idea home by describing in more detail how things like VuFind, Primo, Koha, Evergreen, etc. all use this model. I then made an attempt to describe how our “next generation” library catalogs could go so much further by providing services against the texts as well as services against the index. “Discovery is not the problem that needs to be solved.”
Afterwards a number of us went to lunch where we compared & contrasted libraries. It is a shame the Purdue University, University of Indiana, and University of Notre Dame libraries do not work more closely together. Our strengths compliment each other in so many ways.
“Michael, thanks for the opportunity!”
Something I saw on the way back home.
Eric, I truly think my Umlaut software is an attempt to take a step in that direction of providing advanced services against texts.
Umlaut does not have an index. It assumes users are finding texts and articles in some other software somewhere else. But once they do find a known item, Umlaut — via either a link or content embedded on the other software’s page via javascript — provides services for that item. Fulltext; location in library stacks; inter-library loan; search inside the book from Google, Amazon, HathiTrust; citations and similar items from ISI or Scopus; related information from Wikipedia, Ulrich’s, Amazon, Journal Citation Reports, Worldcat Identities.
This is just a start. I can think of so many more services that could be provided — some which actually exist, and Umlaut needs to have plug-ins written for, others which don’t exist yet and someone needs to create. But Umlaut is a platform for supporting plug-ins for arbitrary services for known items.
One project I’d like to get to in the future is working with LibX 2.0 to allow more pages on the web, without their actual cooperation, to link to Umlaut for library-provided services for items users find wherever.
The more I work with it and think about it, the more I think Umlaut is an important infrastructural building block, for exactly what you’re talking about.
But I’m having trouble getting anyone else to see this!
[…] Eric Lease Morgan recently wrote: I then made an attempt to describe how our “next generation” library catalogs could go so much further by providing services against the texts as well as services against the index. “Discovery is not the problem that needs to be solved.” […]