Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Are we building the “next generation” catalog for us (librarians) or our users? As a read a report from the Next Generation Summit Search Interface Working Group of the Orbis/Cascade Alliance, I have to wonder. Portions of this report are dated¹ other portions are timeless. In particular, this section from page 2 (emphasis added):

How do we define “next generation”?

The working group has considered what it means to create a “next generation catalog” within the context of the current Summit interface and the current definition of “next generation” as understood within the library community. However, maybe this isn’t the right question. In part, library systems have failed to even keep up with our current generation of users, with neither the library community or vendor community really understanding how a current generation catalog might function. We have ideas from looking at vendor sites and social software tools that provide tagging, faceted browsing, and user reviews, but are these really “next generation”? No, they represent current generation functionality that library systems simply have yet to assimilate into their current service offerings. It’s a dangerous confusion of vocabulary. While these services represent “next generation” services for the library community, they don’t for our users. If a simple makeover of the ILS is to be our aim, then we will continue to fail to provide services for our current generation of users. Our current library information systems are failing our users and inhibiting our users’ attempts to build communities around our services and systems.

Waves of change are crashing on the shores of the library profession. New media, new tools, new techniques, and new expectations collide to cause excitement, anxiety, confusion, and concern. It may be difficult to determine where we are and where we are going. At our present crossroads, it is useful to view the pressures and effects of change on our services as a matrix of commercial versus local on one axis and physical versus digital on the other. Interesting observations about the nature of content and our reaction to it can be made at the intersections of commercial and local with physical and digital. This essay uses these intersections to examine the waves of content coming to the library and our ways of managing it.

As our profession re-examines itself and the services we provide to users, we seem to spend a great deal of time concerned about the way our “web front door” looks and operates. That is, we expect web users to come through the front page of our website and so we agonize over the features as well as the look-and-feel of our portal of information. A section of the JISC & SCONUL Library Management Systems Study¹ released last month suggests a different path for our information environment: one where the content is not bound to the confines of our web portals. This is the first in a series of posts over the next few days and/or weeks that explore this and other observations and commentary found in the JISC/SCONUL report.

This morning’s Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog has a story with the title “Should Colleges Sell Ads to Pay for New Technology?” that links to a blog posting by Martin Weller of the Open University in the U.K. As it happens, a colleague and I were talking about a strikingly similar topic at lunch yesterday: not just that advertisements could pay for new technology but that ads could pay for content in the libraries. I felt strangely uncomfortable with the concept, and I still do, so (in jester fashion) what better way to explore the discomfort than in a posting here on DLTJ.