Next Generation Catalogs

I chose to focus my posting this week on the power point presentation on next generation catalogs--I find power points remind me a lot of being in class so I automatically feel like I absorb more information, and the format feels a lot friendlier when I try to break it down!

What struck me most throughout the power point was the obvious simplicity and obviousness of the major issues with most OPACs. I can't even count how many times patrons have complained to me about the lack of ease of use of our public catalog. There is no forgiveness on spelling errors (and I mean none), there is a lack of a simple search interface, the catalog pre-filters rather than post-filters (this gets very frustrating very quickly) and searching for an author by his or her first and then last name produces nothing even closely related to the author or their works. Rhode Island's OPAC seems so inherent to me because I work with it every day, I don't even think of the complications.

Browsing Villanova's VuFind catalog reminded me of browsing Google's shopping results (trust me, that's a good thing!). Anything that even slightly reminds me of such an awesome search engine as Google is a huge positive for me. Every element of the catalog seemed to remedy and improve many of most of the common OPAC issues, apart from one big thing--I tried spelling "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" incorrectly, in a number of different ways, and found that the catalog couldn't handle it (there were at least suggestions of what I might have been looking for).

Overall, I can't wait to see friendlier catalogs make their way to more libraries! Speaking critically and honestly, almost any element of the next generation catalogs added to most OPACs would be a fantastic improvement.