In Search Of A Really 'next Generation' Catalog

摘要

Ever since North Carolina State University Libraries launched their Endeca-based OPAC replacement in the beginning of 2006, the library world has been completely obsessed with ditching their old, tired catalog interfaces (and with good reason) for the greener pastures of more sophisticated indexing, more accurate relevance ranking, dust jackets, and the most coveted feature of all: facets. Despite the fact that Medialab had brought AquaBrowser to the U.S. market nearly a year earlier, NC State set the rules of the game and the target that the rest of the profession was to aim for. And, indeed, it was quite a radical and welcome change; the interface to the catalog had barely changed since it had been migrated from command line terminals to the Web. The ink had barely dried on NC State's press release before a whole host of similar products were announced by the library vendors.