PLA Blog

In the past two days I’ve attended two presentations, spanning six hours, on The Catalog. In that time, no one talked about one of my major concerns: users can’t search for the articles in our collection, which means they can’t find them without our help. Perhaps this is such a big issue that it’s not worth mentioning, or maybe it’s so small that no one else cares, or maybe it’s just a dead issue and I should stop caring. Or maybe the panelists have never worked reference.

Anyway, that’s why it was such a pleasure, last night over dinner, to talk to someone who works for one of the larger serials/database vendors.

Me: How are librarians as negotiators?

Not bad. Some better than others. But many are surprisingly good.

Me: Has anyone really impressed you? Not just as a negotiator, but as someone who’s just really smart and informed about what patrons want.

Rick Anderson at Utah. Mark Sandler at CIC. Beth Bernhardt at UNC Greensboro. And there are a lot of really smart people at the California Digital Libraries.

Me: What do you think about open access?

No effect. What really matters right now are consolidation and consortia and everyone’s shrinking budgets. It’s harder and harder for anyone to make money.

Me: Which vendor has the best patron-focused database interface?

Reed Elsevier’s Scopus is really nice. Not that anyone uses it, or any of the competitors’ interfaces for that matter. Nor should they. Google’s better than any of them and it’s what people use to find articles. Then it’s just a question of accessing them.

Tags: ala08, ala2008, databases, Google, PLA, serials

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 8:56 pm and is filed under PLA Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.