Review: LTR — Next-Generation Library Catalogs
Cliff October 8th, 2007
The July/August issue of Library Technology Reports gives a comprehensive overview of Next-Generation Library Catalogs courtesy of Marshall Breeding. Breeding is one of the leading experts in the field of library automation, and it shows in the expansive knowledge he relates in this issue of LTR.
The introduction to this report is alone worth the cost. The author succeeds in explaining the benefits and drawbacks of legacy catalogs, the emerging options that users are coming to expect, and how each of these “next-generation” options provide both benefits and challenges. Many of the complex issues that are raised by next generation features (such as relevancy ranking in federated searches) are explained at length, giving the reader a clear picture of the present challenges.
Breeding goes on to highlight various tools for next-generation catalogs, including AquaBrowser, Endeca, Encore, Primo, and WorldCat Local. He covers each of these in enough detail to answer the technical questions that spring to mind, and yet he succeeds in doing so in an accessible way. Also lightly covered are next-generation ILSes Polaris, our local hero Evergreen, Koha, and LibraryThing for Libraries. Although I was hoping that he would review VuFind, he notes on on his blog that it was not available at press time.
This is an excellent overview of the the options that are available, should your library be shopping around for a new ILS or looking at expanding your current catalog.
For those looking for a shorter introduction to the topic, I recommend Breeding’s The Birth of a New Generation of Library Interfaces in the October 2007 issue of Computers in Libraries, p. 34.
As a followup, Marshall Breeding did a review of Vufind in “Smart Libraries” newsletter:
http://www.techsource.ala.org/sln/september-2007.html
Excellent! Thanks for pointing that out, Chris!