Talk given at the IFLA Satellite Meeting of the Information Technology Section: "Emerging trends in technology: libraries between Web 2.0, semantic web and search technology". Florence, August 19-20, 2009
1. Next Generation Catalogs: What Do Users Think? Conclusions from the beluga Project Anne Christensen State and University Library Hamburg, Germany IFLA Satellite Meeting Emerging trends in technology Libraries between Web 2.0, semantic web and search technology Florence, August 20, 2009
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3. The next generation catalog… - aka Catalog 2.0, 0PAC 2.0, (social) discovery tool -
11. Catalog 2.0 in Hamburg State and University Library Hamburg + 7 other libraries from the Hamburg area November 2007 – October 2010 348.000 € grant from E-Learning Consortium Hamburg
12. Search interface indexed with Solr, normalization format: Dublin Core Google-like simplicity first stab at visualization
However enrichment of the catalog with metadata from Amazon bombed. We figured that people would be happy to see as much information as possible about a title, especially since studies showed that Amazon is the go-to place when looking for literature. But both students and faculty made a strong case for the neutrality of the catalog, accepting only „neutral“ information like ToCs and renouncing the inclusion of reviews from non-academic users.
Quite surprisingly, users in our usability tests complained about the simplicity of the user interface, specifically the lack of an advanced search interface. This still strikes us as very odd, seeing how seldomly the advanced search is used in our current catalog. But obviously it is very surprising for users to see such a simple interface for a library catalog. Yet when people started using the simple search, they quickly forgot about the advanced options because the drilldowns seemed to help them a lot.