[WEB4LIB] Re: Coughing up Coffman

[Laura Cohen]

One thing that strikes me about Coffman's proposal is that it is infused
with the ethos of the public library, rather than the academic, special or
other type of library. I do take Roy Tennant's point about the complexity
of the OPAC in his large academic institution, and of course I don't
consider that different types of libraries are mutually exclusive in their
concerns. And of course, I realize that not all public librarians are
agreeing with Coffman!

But, I've been thinking about the following:

1) Coffman seems to envision the Earth's Largest Library (ELL) as primarily
book-oriented. I would guess that his proposal would work best if this
remained the case in the years to come. We all know this won't be so. The
role of the OPAC is changing.

2) With local OPACs taking on more and more electronic items (including the
freebies on the Web), I see the ELL as quite a challenge to navigate. I
hope this catalog would have the capacity to limit a search to an index,
say, for books only. In fact, I wonder if such a catalog would have less
indexes than the Berkeley catalog, when in fact it might need more. What
about an index for the electronic databases and e-journals accessible only
to the students here at the University at Albany, with a link to our proxy
server instructions for off-campus access? Or, should we stop putting
electronic items in the OPAC for the sake of the ELL? And if so, how should
we be building and creating access to our local lists? 

3) I can envision us getting inundated with requests from people who have
not read the ELL record carefully and are requesting ILL for reference
books, books in our special collections unit, building-only books, and
other types of materials that don't circulate. This sort of thing happens
now, but the floodgates would really open if the catalog of the ELL is all
that anyone had access to. For this reason, I can't see that our ILL staffs
would need to be cut down as drastically as Coffman envisions.

4) Many people just want to see the holdings of their local library, the
one they are  in at this very moment. They simply want to go into the
stacks and get a book off the shelf. Let's not forget the needs of these
folks. How easy will it be to identify these items in the ELL? 

In other words, I keep thinking about the fact that libraries are:

	- local institutions 

	- providing access to an increasing number of electronic products that are
available to (local) affiliated users only

Maybe I lack a certain type of vision or imagination, but I'm having a
difficult time fitting this in with Coffman's one-size-fits-all proposal. 

-- Laura Cohen


__________________________
Laura B. Cohen
Network Services Librarian
University at Albany  Libraries     
Albany, NY 12222                              518-442-3492 
LCOHEN at cnsvax.albany.edu       518-442-3567 (FAX)