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Volume 7, Issue 2 - May 2001 |
A Quarterly Newsletter of Bright Ideas for the Technical Services Division
From
Cataloging to Catalog Enrichment
By Noelle Van Pulis, Coordinator, Catalog Maintenance
and Authority Control, Ohio State University Libraries
The new millennium holds much promise for the online
catalog to continue its evolution from a computerized finding
aid into a virtual reader’s advisor. No longer does the catalog
need to be limited to the traditional descriptive elements and
subject analysis. What once was simply “the catalog” is being
expanded and redefined to serve previously unmet user needs,
turning the catalog into what some describe as a “portal” to
information.
This evolution has been occurring at increasing speed since
the early 1980s, when the Council on Library Resources (CLR,
now the Council on Library and Information Resources) sponsored a series
of online catalog studies. Nearly a decade later, in 1991, the Reference
and Adult Services Association (RASD, now RUSA) held a “Think Tank
on the Present and Future of the Online Catalog” and many of those
papers described possibilities for features and functionality that, after
another ten years, are becoming increasingly common.
No one has doubted that users wanted and needed greater
‘recall’ – meaning increased retrieval of potentially relevant
works. Others have described the need for users to have more
information to help evaluate the relevance and the quality of
the works found through a catalog search. In the card catalog,
traditional contents notes (MARC 505) provided more information once a
user already had found the cards through look-up of the main or added
entries. Now, in many if not most online catalogs the traditional contents
notes are searchable, at least by keyword, increasing the possibility
of finding information at the chapter level. Vendors already are looking
into even deeper access by providing searches on book indexes.
Developing technology already provides new opportunities
for enriching the basic catalog record by using a growing array
of vendor services. These allow libraries to maximize addition
information while minimizing individual effort. Adding “tables
of contents” (TOC) data post- cataloging is one feature already implemented
by many libraries, including an increasing number of the members of the
OhioLINK consortium. Other options include links to book reviews, summaries
or annotations,
author profiles, and pictures of book covers or jackets.
Vendor
Services
Two vendors that are actively developing catalog enrichment options are
Blackwell’s and Syndetic Solutions. At Blackwell’s technical
services overview page
[http://www.blackwell.com/services/techserv/techserv.htm]
they describe the categories of books that generally are covered by the
TOC service, now about 800 per week according to the website. More details
are available in a PDF document at http://www.blackwell.com/services/techserv/tocenrichment.pdf.
At Syndetic’s website
[http://eth0.raq014.bea1.synd.easystreet.com/site/descriplib.htm]
links are available to sample displays of Table of Contents,
summaries or reviews, author notes, genre descriptions, and other options
for additional information and access. Unlike reviews available from commercial
book sale web sites, these vendor-supplied reviews are derived from traditional
and respected sources, giving users reliable evaluative information.
More information about the array of possibilities in general, and what
is now available or under development from Syndetic Solutions, is provided
in a paper delivered at the Bicentennial Conference on Bibliographic Control
for the New Millennium held at the Library of Congress in November 2000.
The paper is available at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/calcagno_paper.html.
TechKNOW ispublished by the Technical ServicesDivision
of the Ohio LibraryCouncil and is received by individual members of theDivision. For more information, or to submit articles,
please contact Margaret Maurer at Kent State University Libraries and Media Services at 330.672.1702, at home at
330.628.0313, or via the internet at mmaurer@lms.kent.edu or sky@en.com.
