16
Mar

Laura at the Llyfrgellydd blog rants about library technology. And, she takes no hostages. “Multiple systems, or at the very least, the appearance of multiple systems, are enemies to usability” is Laura’s first lob. Oh goodie, she’s going to have something nice to say about federated search, right, since hiding those multiple systems are friends to usability? Not a chance.

I think one of the reasons federated search doesn’t work is because the metadata is coming from so many different sources that it just can’t be translated consistently. It seems a huge waste of time that vendors have people working on connectors to read that metadata and parse it.

I didn’t realize that federated search doesn’t work. I assume Laura is writing about the metadata like title, author, and snippet that forms the search results pages. Yes, consistency isn’t perfect but it’s not nearly as bad as Laura pronounces.

Kidding aside, go read Laura’s article. You’ll get the perspective of a “past life” (her words) reference librarian who has many bones to pick with library technology. It’s good market research material.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed!

Tags:

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 16th, 2010 at 4:00 pm and is filed under viewpoints. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or TrackBack URI from your own site.

One Response to "Laura rants about library technology"

  1. 1 Dorothea Salo
    March 17th, 2010 at 4:53 am  

    Perhaps if you are curious about what Laura means, you should ask Laura? I didn’t see your name in her comment section.

    Sneering at her only makes you look arrogant and out-of-touch. I can only assume this is not your preference.

Leave a reply

Name (*)
Mail (*)
URI
Comment