MetadataDigital Libraries à la Carte 2007
(op verzoek van de Ticer organisatie is deze blogposting verder in het Engels)
Although I had most of the text for this posting already in my head on the way back home from Tilburg University last Thursday, It took me almost a week to find the time to actually write down my thoughts. I’ve only been present for one day, attending the ’Libraries Supporting Research and Open Access‘ track.
And I have to be honest, I did hear a couple of new, interesting things. ScientificCommons was one of them, another one was Swivel.com.
And when John MacColl talked about the need for simplification in publishing tools, it got me thinking about ways to improve the repository upload workflow at Fontys. At the end of his presentation I had an alternative publication-uploading workflow worked out, the next day it was part of a projectplan.
Chatterbot
And another idea almost made it into a projectplan. At lunchtime I had the pleasure of meeting Anne Christensen, she told me about her Chatterbot-project. She said some very interesting things about what a library could do with virtual/artificial reference. Will keep this one in mind, for now the rather high implementation costs and estimated amount of work involved keeps me from writing it into a project proposal.
What’s wrong with repositories?
So I got to meet some new people, say hi to old friends and learned a couple of new things. That makes it all good, you could say, but I also learned something negative about repositories which bugs me ever since. Repositories were the central theme in the ‘Libraries Supporting Research and Open Access’-track. A lot has been said about the topic, but all speakers totally ignored one -to me- very vital issue;
The User Interface!
So, what’s wrong with that? Well, most search-interfaces running on top of repositories just look plain awful! For example, check out the VT ETDs repository. A wonderful resource maybe, but if I didn’t know any better one could think it was made in 1994.
Why is that? Could it be that the main focus is still very much on ‘getting the data’? Or maybe it is the same problem library catalogs have been suffering from for years; the vendor just doesn’t care about improving the look and feel of the end-user interface, simply because there’s no money in that.
Make it better
If something similar is going on with repositories, then now is the time to do something about it. For starters, you could check out Marshall Breeding‘s article about Next-Generation Library Catalogs.
Hopefully we don’t have to wait for a next generation of librarians to start caring about the way we present the digital library and it’s services to the user. I’m serious; libraries are not ugly, let’s make those repositories look pretty.
Mooi stukje. Ik heb het erg eens met je laatste punt. Ik zou daar nog aan willen toevoegen: de zoekmogelijkheden bij een aantal repositories. Wat bv te denken van Darlin en Darenet. Zoeken op onderwerp is daarin niet mogelijk. En dat terwijl repositories nota bene door informatiespecialisten worden beheerd.
gr,
Peter
I’m sorry, I’ll repeat in English:
I agree very much with your last statement and would like to add: searching facilities in repositories. Some Dutch [portals to] repositories don’t even offer subject search while most repositories are managed by information specialists in libraries!