OCLC Report: Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want

OCLC’s has released their report Online Catalogs: What Users and Librarians Want for downloading or purchase. 
According to OCLC:
The Online Catalogs report presents findings from these research efforts in order to understand:

The metadata elements that are most important to end users in determining if an item will meet his or her needs
The enhancements end users would like [...]

Jack Of All Trades, Master of None

Our cataloguing department had a chance to sit down this past Friday and listen to ALA’s super debate “There’s no catalog like no catalog”.
Highlights
1.   How does a library catalogue get better every time it is used?
2.   What do we “cost” in relation to our benefit?
3.   Where do our services fit in to a user’s goals?
4.   [...]

Readers’ Advisory Services: In the Backroom

As a member of our Readers’ Advisory Team at HPL, I’ve become interested in what the catalogue can do to assist and promote RA services while at the same time, maintaining the integrity of the catalogue.  While I don’t mind creating local headings if they provide long-term benefits to access, I don’t feel comfortable adding [...]

Thoughts on Chad Abel-Kops’ paper

Now that most of you have had an opportunity to read Mr. Abel-Kops’ paper, I thought it was time to write my own reflections on what he has written.
Rather than taking the view that we have not improved our cataloguing services although we have been aware of shortcomings as early as the 1940s, I take [...]

“Raised on Google, this generation won’t settle for the difficult-to-use online library catalogues that many of us are accustomed to”

Here’s an article I stumbled across late last week.  I think it really points to some ideas for the future of libraries, the library catalogue and information retrieval. 
Here are some quotes from the article:
“… a former digital projects and web librarian, and an avid gamer, is charged with finding ways to provide library resources and [...]