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Monday, March 19, 2007

Future of the library Catalog

My interest lies in the belief that our catalogs will have to get loaded with all kinds of content including links to audio, video, archived discussion groups, and the archives of blogs if we are to continue to attract the public to our sites. On top of that all this will have to be searchable from a simple interface, as opposed to traditional trend of one search method for each database or format.

So my notion of a knowledge base was not so much a formal knowledge base but a searchable archive of questions that could be integrated into our webfeat catalog that already includes our books, music, movies, 6 of our subscription databases and Google.

To me this extends the library as community meeting place metaphor by allowing others (the public) to be the expert on a topic by contributing comments and answers to a blog that is searched as part of our catalog by another patron seeking info.

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