Many of our readings and part of our discussion last class (1/24/08) was centered around the idea of Library 2.0 and the OPAC. The question was raised whether it is a good idea or not to let patrons participate in the OPAC. I would have to say: a little. Many of our readings take an extreme view of keep up the status quo or turn over everything to the people. I really doubt many feel this way, but you often have to make an outrageous argument to get published. Moderate stances are not exciting enough to sell journals or get blogs read, but I digress.
The main argument made for scraping the current system of librarian based tagging is the popularity of Amazon.com and other sites like Flickr and Library Thing. Those sites work great with user tags, reviews, and recommendations, so the idea is why not bring that to the OPAC? I have a concern that I have never seen addressed. How do we adapt a system used by Amazon.com with its millions of users to one for a single library that has significantly fewer? Think about it. How many times have you looked up a book and found no reviews or just a few? It happens to me all the time. Now there are books that have hundreds of customer reviews, but statistically 400 reviews: 4 millions copies purchased is not a high ratio. I still think patron reviews would be a cool thing to add to the OPAC, but I do not believe it would work as well as it does for Amazon.com. I wonder if patron reviews could even be used by censors to discourage others from reading materials they find objectionable? Would staff time be used to read every review posted? Would any reviews be deleted? What criteria would be used? It could be quite the can of worms.
Tagging works on the web because of the large volume of people doing it. Statistically, someone else has to tag the same way you do. Weren't standard subject heading invented in libraries to provide consistency because when everyone was left to their own devices it was chaos? A tag cloud looks cool, but really how useful is it? I think the real thing needed here is a program that can be downloaded onto any OPAC that will update some of LC's outdated terminology on every bibliographic record. For example, install the program and every subject heading that says "Cookery" would be changed to "Cooking." That would be progress.
The whole if you liked "Book A, why not read Book B" aspect of Amazon.com is also very helpful, but it has to be modified for OPAC's. There would need to be a way to ensure it only recommends books the library has. Amazon.com sells all those, that is why they can make so many recommendations. Patrons at a library will not find it helpful to be given five book recommendations just to be told five times the library does not own any of them. This would need to be a service offered by large library systems or consortia, if patrons are patient enough to wait on ILL.
My basic argument has centered around the disparity in the customer volume that a library would serve and Amazon.com serves. Many of the authors harangued OPAC's for not offering many things that Amazon.com does. I disagree. I have seen several public library OPAC's that feature cover art, reviews (from professional review sources,) and even relevancy ratings. Usually if I am having an difficult time finding the book I want, it is because the library does not own it. Amazon.com will find it because they sell everything. In the quest to sound more "cutting edge" when it comes to technology, many total Library 2.0 advocates ignore that often is more a matter of lack books to choose from then difficulty of navigation for OPAC systems or users. The OPAC's I have trouble navigating are the ones that have bibliographic records created by untrained personnel that were hired to replace expensive librarians. These are the OPAC's full of records with no subject headings, no book summaries, and the information that is there is entered incorrectly; but that is a whole other can of worms.
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We discussed the differences between an OPAC and the Amazon web site in one of my previous classes also. We also discussed the difference between a library and a bookstore (other than the coffee). For my part I think the libraries would be well served in thinking through how to rank the books that are "hits" correctly. I'm becoming convinced that part of the problem is that the OPACS don't attempt to deal with ranking in any reasonable fashion. They cheat by trying to reduce the number of this. This is bad, they should instead do the harder thing: they should try to determine which items are the most relavent -- even if the number of items is in the tens of thousands. Likewise, it should also try to guess the intent if the number of hits is zero. Google attempts to guess the intent, and their dealing with lots more items. Surely the libraries can handle it.
i think IU's new opac is meant to be more 2.0 and i don't like it very much at all. the perfect 2.0 opac would keep the wealth of classification knowledge that librarians pack into their records and augment it with a 2.0 interface that doesn't scream "one-click ordering."
I agree that the mass customers vs. the limited area patrons will have a different impact on how the OPACS that have gone 2.0 will look and be used as opposed to the way we know amazon.com. I do believe that the shift is coming, but I don't think it's always very pretty in the beginning. I've seen some set-ups that just aren't user-friendly and way more intimidating to the patrons accustomed to the older versions. Still, with tweaking and the expectations of technology advancement within the library the response will ultimately be positive. At least that's what I kinda figure.
You really got people thinking, Jenny. This is a topic that is going to continue for the next few years at least as libraries attempt to evolve from the more traditional OPAC to a newer model. I agree with you that libraries will have to carefully consider the implications of web-based services they offer, especially ones designed to engage minors.
I had another thought on the reviews thing. For a school, it would be possible for an English teacher to assign a book review and have students actually post the review to the book review portion of the OPAC if such a capability were available. I don't know if any teachers would take advantage of such a system, but they might. Also, if teachers (or the media specialist on the teacher's behalf) could tag books as "books good for the xyz report" that would be a handy way for students to get a jump on the research. Again, not everyone would make use of it, but that is a place where that could come in handy, depending upon the system.
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