Thing #15

I definitely like the thinking behind Library 2.0. A quote from Rick Anderson in "Away from the Icebergs" are very applicable to OCL:
"Services that can't be used without training, then it's the services that need to be fixed - not our patrons."
A few years ago one the best OCL committees I was ever on was disbanded: the Catalog Access Team. A group of library staff from all levels, locations and departments got together to make the catalog user friendly. This was a great thing, even though with the technology at that time, it was difficult. Imagine how much we could do now with Web 2.0! I think one of the reasons it was disbanded was to save money(?). I also remember hearing a previous administrator pooh-poohing the idea. I think perhaps the switch to vendor processing was a bigger part of the decision because it would probably be impossible to get vendors to go along with it. (When you look at all the corrections we have to make to their cataloging now, I can well imagine if we tried to ask for something different.) Since we have to look for something new since Horizon is not being supported any longer, why don't we look for one that embraces Web 2.0? It seems that it would allow us to escape from cataloging decisions being made for us by vendors. But also we have to bring our physical collections in line with what is in our database. TRYS is currently in the process of going through our entire collection and one part it to make it consistent with what is in Horizon.