Conceptualizing Catalogs

I recently ran across the blog, Everybody's Libraries, wherein author John Mark Ockerbloom spends a few recent posts discussing his vision for the future of library catalogs as concept-oriented, that they'll continue to be more concept-driven. Catalogs will be souped-up, interactive portals of information discovery, supporting both known-item discovery and browsing in new ways by increased cross-reference and conceptualizing resource description that goes beyond MARC's added entries.

Several things come to mind reading these posts. The desire for intuitive search environments is strong. Google now personalizes search, so that when I search 'thomas jefferson' as a novice Jeffersonian compared to someone steeped in TJ research, our results won't look the same. The vertical search of social networks like Facebook and Twitter retrieve results from a 'catalog' of peers semantically suited to me: they get my lingo. Antiquated OPACs controlled by strict vocabulary aren't intuitive, but are we setting ourselves up to sacrifice specificity for browsability? I don't think so, as long as catalogs still function to retrieve known information: title, author, etc. But for bibliographic records to function as information gateways seems to me to reflect both the way we interact with information nowadays (no 'loop' is closed, we leave everything open for possible discovery), and the surfacing of information on the Web (the deep/invisible Web unlocking itself). Also, part of what's going on here is that we deal with items/intentions beyond the physical, and so perhaps this is a better way of thinking about how to describe/interact with items/information.

I'm interested in all of this because at Jefferson Library I'm creating records in LibraryThing, a social networking environment, and they seem to me to fit the, ahem, concept of concept-oriented catalogs. They're certainly interactive. A user comes to the entry for Mathew Dobson's A medical commentary on fixed air in Thomas Jefferson's library. The record not only tells, but shows, the user various information. For example, Jefferson inherited the book from George Wythe, so the user is linked to Wythe's LT entry for the title. Concepts quickly surface in this environment: the user follows links to transcribed and original manuscript images of Jefferson's book lists, allowing, simply from viewing the LibraryThing record, insight into Jefferson's classification system. That's a lot to derive from a bibliographic record, and perhaps I'm waxing hopeful that this is the case. But as Endrina has pointed out, we're putting an awful lot of data in front of people with this type of record, and in a visually interesting and conceptually striking manner. I think as catalogs evolve to be more user-oriented (as opposed to system-oriented) that data will be presented increasingly conceptually and socially, and that this bodes well for creators and users of bibliographic records.