I have to strongly disagree with what I saw as Nate’s primary point in his last post, What I want from a catalog. First, he pointed out that, “Library catalogs, by definition, contain only your library’s stuff,” and went on to conclude that this “is the killing blow to any idea of catalog-as-research-tool.” The primary argument is that a library can never compete with the amount of data amassed by the likes of Google or Amazon or Worldcat.

I agree with the fact that it is futile to try to beat these companies at their own game. That will never happen by a single library. They have more data and they have something that might be better than all the other kinds: intentional data. They can build their interfaces based on how people vote with their wallets through purchasing data from Amazon or library holdings data at OCLC. They can follow the money and we cannot.

However, this is not to say that libraries, and academic libraries in particular, do not have a niche in the information market. It is crucial for library systems developers to understand that libraries build collections. We make deliberate, careful and researched choices about what goes into the collection. We don’t have all the data at our disposal precisely because we don’t have unlimited budgets, so if we are doing our jobs well, we are only selecting the good materials for our collections.

Libraries can build a research map with a next generation library catalog. A good collection is defined not simply by the fact that it contains multiple items, but because their is some cohesion among the items collected. One thing that I cannot understand is why people cannot look past the physical containers of information objects. For an information collection, the cohesion which makes it worthy of the effort needed to build and sustain it is not based on the fact that they are all physically available items at the researcher’s disposal. That would simply make it a collection. What makes the collection good is the fact that it represents both a breadth and depth of knowledge required to conduct research. Or simply put, it contains good information.

I imagine a research process that is more like a partnership of the big research tools (Amazon, Google, OCLC) with the local library’s online research tools. In his discussion of the way that Wikipedia functions as a probability-based system Chris Anderson wrote in The Long Tail, “Wikipedia should be the first source of information, not the last. It should be a site for information exploration, not the definitive source of the facts.”

My take on the current state of research is similar. In the beginning of the research process it is advantageous as Nate said to go to a source that is not limited by physical geography. However, I think there are efficiencies that can be gained if libraries can get involved in the later stages of the research process.

After finding one good item at Amazon, you are offered “more like this” because someone wants to make a buck by selling you two books rather than one. At a library, where the collection has presumably been carefully selected, if you find the one good book you have a greater chance that the “more like this” offerings will also be more good information.

If Amazon wants to make another buck, what is our motivation? In the university environment in particular, we participate in the original reputation economy. A university employee inherits status from the status of the university. The university’s reputation is based on the quality of the research and scholarship it produces. Thus if I want to improve my reputation as a librarian, I have every incentive to make sure my researchers are finding quality information that makes their academic work as sound as possible.

In essence, I want to select and then make available a great collection. While libraries have been doing a great job building the collection, we are only now beginning to see how much work still needs to be done building systems that showcase those collections.

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