[WEB4LIB] Re: Physical vs. Virual union catalogues

[Lee Jaffe]

I feel I need to disagree with Roy here.  As someone who tried to
put the virtual catalog idea into the pipeline during the MELVYL
redesign discussion, I never felt that the concept got a fair hearing.
No, the virtual union catalog technology is not yet mature enough
to stand up to a real-world test.  However, very little progress
would be made if we applied the same test to every emerging
technology.  Certainly, prototypes of online catalogs faired very
badly compared to card catalogs, but someone was smart enough
to see the potential in the new technology and pursue it despite
the superficial limitations.

I've been working for a few years as part of a project team
creating a virtual union catalog for our regional library system.
Our system is based upon DRA's Web2 product, one of only a
few commercial packages available for this purpose.  Right from
the start there have been problems and they persist despite some
very talented folks working long and hard to fix them.  I'll admit
that I can't see the DRA product or any of its competitors taking
the place of a really mature, well-supported physical union catalog
on the order of MELVYL.  On the other hand, our entire system
cost less than $30,000 out of pocket, is supported by an existing
tech support position (i.e., no new staff) and has required only a
few hundred hours of support time over a period of 3 years.
Imagine what we could have done if we'd had MELVYL's development
budget behind us.

Before writing off VUCs based either on Roy's comments or Karen
Coyle's study, I think you should take a look at the bigger picture.
As far as I can determine, the major limitation to VUCs raised here
is record merging and deduplication.  We should remember that these
were also problems with physical union catalogs initially and that
considerable work went into resolving those problems.  Why can't the
same efforts be applied to make VUCs work just as well?

At the same time, I think it important to recognize that large,
physical union catalogs are a dead-end technology.  For one thing,
they are just that -- catalogs -- and can't do much else.  We
have moved past the catalog as the epitome of library automation
and our users are certainly expecting more from us.  At the very
least, they want to know whether the item is available (status)
and likely want to be able to request a hold or delivery.  (It is
interesting that interactive features added to static online
union catalogs are provided by tapping the same technology that
is at the heart of virtual union catalogs.)

To put this question another way, if you had to come up with a
solution today where information needed to be collected from
an assortment of dispersed systems and displayed real-time, what
approach would you take?  Would you create a new database, large
and flexible enough to hold all the data from all the subject systems,
setting up a structure that loaded static information periodically,
with all the corresponding standards and protocols issues.  Or,
would you create a system which could poll just the required systems
for the needed information real-time and display it as requested?
If you picked the latter approach, then the fact that there isn't
a good product at hand isn't the most important factor.  To paraphrase
G.B. Shaw, "Now we know where we want to go.  All that left is to
figure out how to get there."

-- Lee Jaffe, UC Santa Cruz





At 3:06 PM -0700 5/11/01, Roy Tennant wrote:
>To my way of thinking, virtual union catalogs are what you do when 
>you can't do a physical union catalog. Virtual union catalogs have a 
>set of problems that are more difficult to solve than with actual 
>union catalogs. For example, de-duping (merging records that are for 
>the same item).
>
>If you go search some large virtual union catalogs (for example, 
>http://www.aclin.org/ or http://www.mnlink.org/) for an item you 
>should quickly see what I mean. Multiple records come back for the 
>same book, since records from different libraries are not merged. 
>Merging records on the fly can be considerably more difficult than 
>merging them in a batch-load operation -- particularly since there 
>is no time to iron out problems that cause near-duplicate records 
>not to merge. This alone is a serious enough issue to my way of 
>thinking to make virtual union catalogs a *last* resort.
>
>But for an actual study on this issue, I don't think you can do 
>better than an article by my colleague Karen Coyle, that ran 
>recently in D-Lib Magazine: "The Virtual Union Catalog: A 
>Comparative Study" 
>(http://www.dlib.org/dlib/march00/coyle/03coyle.html). She found 
>that VUCs came up seriously short (in a nutshell).
>Roy
>
>At 10:04 PM -0700 5/9/01, George Zachos wrote:
>>I am doing research on  physical vs. virtual union library catalogues. I am
>>especially interested on the future prospects of both of them.
>>
>>What is your opinion on this matter?
>>
>>Any recent work on this subject is wellcome.
>>
>>Thank you in advance!!!
>>
>>George
>>
>>George Zachos, M.Sc., Ph.D.
>>University Librarian
>>University of Ioannina
>>Central Library
>>P.O.Box 1186
>>GR-45110 Ioannina
>>Greece
>>Tel.: +30-651-97138 Fax:+30-651-97003
>>gzaxos at cc.uoi.gr
>>http://www.lib.uoi.gr