Go Ask Alice....

Well, we've had a start in getting to know the staff and getting to know the needs of the library. We had a good meeting with the library director, Ephraim Mudave. It is interesting that in our discussions that we all share the same struggles--classroom faculty perceptions of cataloging, relationships on campus, and facutly status. I think that it was reassuring for Ephraim to know that the problems were not his alone, but that we, and other librarians, shared the same struggles.
As I shared earler, one of the things that Mary Sue and I will be working on will be to aid NEGST in honing its online library catalog. A library's catalog is its life blood. If a catalog is not reliable is not worth much. You have to be able trust a catalog to tell you what you have, where it is, and is it available. Additional nice features are to be able to locate related materials and to know how many tables an items has or other physical dimensions.
As you work through this entry you must be aware the for most of the world, access, and especially consistent access, is rather new. This is something new for them and something we take for granted as we surf at broadband speeds on Comcast or SBC, or when we enjoy the corporate connect that connects at 1.5 to 4.5 megabits per second. Three years ago when I was here the campus shared a single 56K dial-up connection that relied on an old copper-based telephone system that probably hadn't been upgraded much since the country gained independence 35-40 years ago. According to the CIA World Fact Book there are 1,590,800 cellphones (mobiles) in use. This is five times the amount of traditional copper "land" lines. Three years ago the number was 2 to 1 in favor of mobiles. This resource also cites that there are more Internet users than telephone lines.
Now, back to Alice. One of the female library staff members, Jane, shared with us that some of the students think that Alice is a person and they come to the library asking for her. Some of them believe that Jane's name is Alice despite her corrections.
Very few libraries stay on their first online system for too long. In some ways it is like someone's first dating experience--you learn more about yourself, at times, than the other person, or you become more focused upon your own needs and neglect the other and you move on. In some ways this is what happens with online catalog systems. You learn more about what your own needs are and the limitations of that system in meeting those needs. So, eventually, the vendor gets a "Dear John" letter and sees you dating other vendors. Sad....but, true.
Again, back to Alice. Above you saw the search interface for the Windows software--pretty straightforward, but somewhat vague for the uninitiated. Here you see the web version. Not much of an improvement, however, the improvements come via the hyperlinks that can occur once a search is done--hyperlinks to other books by a particular author or subject.
One of the key elements that would make Mary Sue or me begin to cast our eyes about for a new library vendor would be some basic issues. Alice is made more for a school market and so it is geared to someone who may have less training or fewer trained staff to manage a library catalog with all that that takes. Therefore, an experienced cataloger is unable to get into the guts of what constitutes the core of a "bibliographic" record--the nitty-gritty detail of a book--essentially what is the book about, who wrote it, who published it, how big is it, and where do I find it. Most of the aforementioned is also how you tell if a book is worth reading. In Alice the access to the real nitty-gritty, the MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloguing) record, is blocked. It is facilitated for you, much like a Microsoft product doing the thinking for you--excuse me I meant to spell that word that way!!

Come On! I know you're wondering, where are the flowers. However, you can hang in with me here, this is a good introduction to library science, or at least, how library catalogs work. You know you'll appreciate it in the end.

A final note about Alice and our work here in Kenya. As I mentioned earlier, Mary Sue will be focusing upon "authority control.As you can see from this screen capture, a search of

Marshall, I Howard

returned several results, some of which are not very similar. Only one can, or should, be the correct (or authoritative) version. If you were using the web search screen you'd only come up with the titles that exactly matched your search term, instead of seeing the list of possibilities, as you can in the Windows version.
As you can probably guess most people are going to use the web version and if this is the case how will they ever know about the other books. This is where authority control comes in. Mary Sue, with a very small smidge of help from me, will be working to develop the methods and procedures for the library staff to tackle the merging of these various forms. This will be a life-long process--just like cobwebs. However, Jane wisely said, "Then we must find the spider..." This is so true. The spider are the procedures and attentiveness of the library staff, or any library staff member for that matter. Authority control is about consistency and diligence. The task has no vacation or you'll end up with 6 entries for I. Howard Marshall again.

 

 

 And you thought librarians went to school just to be ssssh-ers.