21st Century

I really liked reading, Toward a Twenty-first Century Library Catalog by Kristin Antelman, Emily Lynema, and Andrew K. Pace.  I enjoyed the brief history of Library Catalogs that they included at the beginning of the article this helped me to further understand the progression that NCSU Libraries took in implementing the Endeca Catalog.  This article made me see that their are a whole lot more aspects to creating a Twenty-first century Library Catalog than I thought.  I guess that is why teams are created in order to think off all of the various aspects that must go into this.  Especially, the searching portion and the multitude of ways in which someone can search and have their results connected together.  Adding the browse aspect was especially smart because I personally like to browse within a section when at the library or book store.  So being able to do that while searching within the libraries collection is a great asset.  Personally, any library catalog that makes it easier for our patrons to access our materials is important.  But the need for improvement is always there to create more user friendly material retrieval.  In the world of tagging is might make this harder because people will come up with their own terminology that may not jive within the catalog system.  It is important for us as Catalog creators to link the user to related terms and similar searches within their parameters.  I think that the Endeca Catalog use at the NCSU Libraries is a great step towards better accessibility and 21st Century Library Catalogs.