2. Roy Tennant California Digital Library Roy Tennant Life Beyond MARC: The Case for Revolutionary Change in Library Systems & Services

3. Where I’m Coming From Challenges are merely opportunities viewed from below There are three requirements for survival: –Having the right gear –Making the right decisions –Luck We have far to go but we have a good start, and many models to emulate and improve upon

4. Key Messages The game has changed We can no longer simply do what we’ve always been doing We must revisit our strategies & priorities… …and reallocate resources to fulfill those new strategies & priorities It may be painful, but it is certainly needed and overdue

5. Why We Must Get Our Act Together

16. How We Got in This Mess to Begin With

17. A Mini History of Library Automation Automation began in the back room: –Circulation –Cataloging (where we now rest comfortably on our laurels) –Acquisitions And moved into public areas almost as an afterthought (why do you think we call them OPACS?) Systems were optimized for librarians, not users Paper journal indexes were simply replaced with electronic versions Few accommodations for remote users were made

18. Key Problems Conflated management and discovery purposes Created (or allowed to be created) stovepipe information systems Rested on our laurels after card catalog retrospective conversion Slow to exploit new opportunities Reluctant to collaborate deeply on profession-wide level

19. What We Must Do

20. Expand our catalogs beyond MARC

21. October 15, 2002

23. http://roytennant.com/metadata.pdf

24. http://texts.cdlib.org/escholarship/

30. http://www.loc.gov/standards/catenrich/

31. Brief record (e.g., ONIX) Full record (e.g., MARC) Enhanced record (e.g., METS) Full-text The Continuum We must build systems that do the best they can with what is available Relevance ranking and FRBR-inspired displays become essential

32. Expand our search systems beyond our catalog

33. Library Discovery Systems Must encompass everything that may be appropriate for a particular audience or need Need to accommodate a continuum from a brief metadata record to the entire item [impact: acquisitions, cataloging, reference, systems] Must use weighting and ranking mechanisms to create more effective search results [impact: circulation, systems, cataloging, public services]

36. Build search systems with user needs in mind

44. Implications of All This You will not be doing tomorrow what you are doing today (resistance is futile) Better to participate in the change than to have it inflicted upon you Doing new things may mean not having to do other things you’ve grown to hate An exciting time that requires vision, imagination, and flexibility

45. COMMENTS / QUESTIONS?