Roy Tennant at SLA

Roy Tennant, formerly of the California Digital Library and now at OCLC, spoke about the top trends in digital library services at SLA. As a result of a vote by members of the Information Technology Division, the top trend that members wanted to hear about was the future of the catalog. Tennant announced the demise of the local catalog. He said libraries need an ILS but users need "search" and they want to find everything (not just books) in that search. He predicted that search and discovery will move to the network level with tools such as Google, WorldCat and metasearch engines. He then described library projects that validate this trend. The University of Washington Libraries are beta testing WorldCat Local. Search results are relevance ranked, allow for faceted browsing and integrate articles in the results. OCLC itself is using tag clouds in its FictionFinder and WorldCat Identities projects.

Tennant didn't limit his talk to the catalog. He named other top trends: mass digitalization, better linking, refocusing on user needs and amazing new interfaces. I agreed totally with his frustration with link resolvers. He described a University of Rochester program called GUF - Getting Users to Full-Text - that reduces click through and gives the user full text directly from the linked title. If full text is not available, the user gets the holding record (with a map! ) or a pre-filled-in ILL form. Rochester also puts user's needs first in its CoURse pages like this one for a History course on The Civil War.