WEB 4 LIB LISTSERV

I have been watching this listserv for most of the semester and the one thread that seems to have generated the most comment is the one about Google & the Library Catalog. The original post was submitted on 4-10-06 and began with a person asking whether or not other libraries had allowed Google to crawl their library catalog and if so what was the impact on the catalog performance. In addition what were the policies about crawlers and the factors influencing the decision.

Many people had very strong opinions about this topic. While most seemed to agree that allwoing the crawlers access to the catalog was not helpful for the performance of the catalog and the results weren't helpful to the users there was not total agreement. One woman posted a link to her new wordpress version of her library catalog, the results of which could be picked up in Google. I didn't fully understand what she was doing, but it was an interesting idea.

The consensus seemed to be that while Google and similar search engines seem to be the first choice of many for finding information and thus desirable as a finding aid for library results it would be a mess if every library did the same thing. In addition how frustrating for potential library users if they find the record for a book that would be perfect, but it is in a library completely inaccessible to them by distance, etc.

Many people seemed to want to use what works in Google and use it in the library catalog, things such as tagging and the spelling forgiveness found in Google. I think this is a great idea. Everyone is prone to misspell things, and often a person has no idea how to begin, let alone correct a misspelling. Add to that the fact that when you do misspell something in an opac all you get is "no results" and you have to wonder, is there nothing there or did I misspell it. Do I really need to pull out a dictionary to find the correct spelling? Yuck, how time consuming, and today's user does not have time for that kind of hassel.

I'm not convinced that letting Google loose in our catalog is the answer. If people want to use Google for library books they can use open World Cat, which was actually suggested by other people on the listserv. The only problem with this is that it is not widely advertised and so most people do not know about it. I find that like Google Scholar, only librarians and some academics know about it. Making our library catalogs more user-friendly (Googlized) is probably our best option. If people realize our catalog isn't impossible to search they will be more likely to use it and more likely to use our resources.