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Alenka Šauperl’s and Jerry D. Saye’s article, “Have we made any progress? Catalogues of the future revisited,” is a follow up of an earlier article they wrote nine years ago. In the earlier article, they provided suggestions intended to improve a library’s online catalog, in the user’s eyes. They recommended showing the table of contents of books, and allowing users to comment on books they checked out. The new article tries to answer the question of whether these catalogs made any progress within the past several years, in terms of user friendliness. The authors wrote these articles hoping that with these suggestions, library catalogs would “survive ‘Google attack’” (Saye and Šauperl 2009).
During this semester, Google has come up in our discussions, in both, positive and negative ways. The projects Google Books and Google Scholar made some of my classmates angry, while others were awed by Google’s ability to spearhead such a movement. “Google attack” seems even more likely today than it did nine years ago, as much as the search engine still retains its simplicity and popularity. The word Google even became a verb in 2006, when the Oxford English Dictionary defined it as such (Bylund 2006).
As Google grows, how do Saye and Šauperl suggest for library catalogs to improve further? One area that could use improvement is the results page. Google lists its results by popularity, something the authors find alarming. Google Books and Google Scholar lists results by loading date, another poor form of listing results. The authors pointed to the North Carolina State University Library’s OPAC as an example of a sophisticated results page. Unlike Google, their results page is listed by subject. If a large amount of results are retrieved, the user is able to limit the results with various options (Saye and Šauperl 2009). These intuitive results pages should be inclued in more OPACs, which hopefully will draw more users into adopting them.
The authors also mentioned the need for OPACs to have multiple interfaces. In my opinion, OPACs should become “pioneers” in creating different interfaces for specific groups of people. As professionals, librarians strive to ensure freedom of information for everyone. To me, this means providing information regardless of a user’s language barrier, disability, or age. If a library is located in a multilingual neighborhood, the library’s OPAC should have an interface for those local language speakers. If blind people use the library, screen readers should be installed, and the OPAC should have a voice input/output option. For children, an OPAC using “Simple English” could make browsing easier. Google and Amazon do not have such functions, and could bolster OPAC’s popularity with these groups of people.
In their conclusion, Saye and Šauperl urge librarians not to “take ‘no’ as a satisfactory answer” when OPAC vendors and other librarians resist these changes (2009). Librarians must demand these new features in their OPACs in order to keep up with the “Google attack” and to ensure the existence of OPACs in the future.
Bylund, Anders. (2006, July). To Google or Not to Google. Retrieved from The Motley Fool website: http://www.fool.com/investing/dividends-income/2006/07/05/ to- google-or-not-to-google.aspx
Sauperl, A.; Saye, J. D. (2009). Have we made any progress? Catalogues of the future revisited. Journal of Documentation 65(3): 500-514.
