[Web4lib] How to label the OPAC (was: Role of the OPAC)

[Jim Campbell]

Call the catalog anything you like. We call ours Virgo and most of our
students learn that pretty early. If they come to a service desk and ask how
to find a video, they understand when the librarian (or student worker) says
to look it up in Virgo or in the library catalog. It really isn't a big
deal.

What is a big deal is that a lot of them do ask how to find a video.
Depending on what their experience of library catalogs has been, they may
not realize that the catalog is the way to find videos at the University of
Virginia or that we have links in our catalog to a lot of e-books and to
various Internet resources that are relevant to the University's curriculum
or that you can browse the shelves by call number or search our manuscript
collections. And even if they do realize these things, why shouldn't they go
directly to the type of search they need rather than to a general catalog
entry point?

If your catalog contains only data about locally held print materials, then
maybe library catalog is enough as a label. If it does anything more than
that, then maybe you need to think about multiple labels. So what we're
moving to do here is to recognize that the catalog is a set of tools for
finding various kinds of things just as our collections of article, image
and numerical databases are tools for finding various kinds of things. You
try to identify the most common questions your users ask of the library
(testing here showed they were how do I find books, find articles, find
videos) and set up links that will guide people to getting answers and will
get them to answers in as few steps as possible. 

For all the limitations it has, Google is extremely useful. But Google
Scholar is proof that it's difficult to carry that model over to the world
of scholarly information or even to non-scholarly articles and books. For
the moment, the best way to do that kind of research is to use tools that
were specifically designed for that general environment (e.g., the catalog
or InfoTrac) or for a specific disciplinary environment (e.g. MathSciNet or
Dyabola).  Libraries are the best source most people have for those tools,
so we need to show people the way to get them. But as we chop up the
information world, we also need to use metasearch to put it back together.
Give people the chance to look for videos on biology, to search the
Encyclopedia of Life Sciences and Biological Abstracts at the same time.

- Jim Campbell
Campbell at Virginia.edu
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of 
> Mitchell, Michael
> Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2005 11:06 AM
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: RE: [Web4lib] How to label the OPAC (was: Role of the OPAC)
> 
> Where would we be if our academic disciplines were so worried 
> about introducing students to new vocabulary or specialized 
> meanings of old vocabulary? If college students don't know 
> what a catalog is in a library it is time they learned. It's 
> not like we're asking them to learn the meaning of a word 
> like polyhydroxyalkanoates. I'm not going to stop calling our 
> library a library either just because some students don't 
> know what all we have to offer.
> 	Having said that, I think something like "Library 
> Catalog - Find books and more" makes sense.
> 
> Michael Mitchell
> Technical Services Librarian
> Brazosport College
> Lake Jackson, TX
> michael.mitchell at brazosport.edu 
> 
> ---------------------
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org]On
> To: web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: RE: [Web4lib] How to label the OPAC (was: Role of the OPAC)
> > > primary assumption going in. And how many potential users do we 
> > > lose--reasonably intelligent people who are making every effort to
> apply
> > > what they know to our websites--because they look, they apply
> knowledge,
> > > then they conclude we don't offer what we need? They 
> aren't "dumb,"
> and
> > it's
> > > not dumbing anything down to design the system around their task
> > knowledge.
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