It’s been a while since I’ve thought about what, in my mind, electronic catalogs are supposed to do. Today, Steve sent me a link to a test version of a very elegant catalog app built with a fraction of our catalog data. It really brings the cataloging data (you know, that stuff that librarians worked so hard to create) to the forefront, and has a great “shelf browse” view. This (plus this OPAC survey posted to code4lib) got me thinking: what should our catalog be, really?

It’s easy to get all Web 2.0 starry-eyed about this, perhaps partly because our catalog has been so ghastly for so long. People talk about social recommendations, comments, tags, structured blogging, and so on. There are a few problems with going down this road, though:

1. Other people are alerady doing this, well, and for free.
2. The Information Superhighway is littered with the charred-out husks of failed social networks. (Did you know Amazon added tagging a year ago? Have you ever used it?)
3. Library catalogs, by definition, contain only your library’s stuff.

The first two points might be surmountable (and are really the same thing anyhow), but the third is the killing blow to any idea of catalog-as-research-tool. Amazon has more data than you. Google Books has more data than you. Worldcat has more data than you. The thing you need to do your research may be at someone else’s library; this is why we have ILL, after all. Using the OPAC to do research means you’ll miss out on everything that’s not local. We can’t fix that. All of the social networking, “More about this book,” “More books like this,” and so on are all based on using the OPAC as a research tool. We just shouldn’t do that.

The place where our catalog can excel, the place where no one can compete, is in finding things already in our collection. Try using your Voyager-based catalog to find out where a particular book (or journal volume) is. Want extra credit? Try finding a NASA technical report. For some stuff, it’s nearly impossible to do, even for librarians. The number of times I’ve heard a librarian say “Well, I just know this is probably over here…” makes me want to scream. We’re using a catalog that indexes all of our millions of things so badly that our librarians often need to ask other librarians to help find things that are sitting on a shelf or in a file drawer.

It’s shameful.

So… I’m happy to wait on all of the Web 2.0 goodness until we’ve mastered the Web 1.0 thing.

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