Notes on 'Ditch the catalogue!' session

Here are my very raw notes from the session entitled 'Ditch the catalogue!' (Although maybe that exclamation mark should be a question mark?)

This was a very well attended session and prompted some lively debate. Although I am not directly involved with the kinds of systems being talked about, the discussion also covered things I am very interested in, such as changes in user needs and searching behaviours, and the need to find a better balance between traditional and new functions within libraries in terms of staffing.

There was a lot of interest in continuing the discussion online. 

Sam

• This session was prompted by Helen Livingstone's VALA presentation.
• Should we only catalogue special and unique collections locally, especially if someone else can keep the data for most non-unique things? 
• If you don't have the catalogue records, you can't do some of the "fun stuff"; but being able to work effectively by sharing/coordinating is essential.
  Do we all need to be doing everything e.g. copy cataloguing?
• Imbalance in resources. There are still so many cataloguers in some organisations, yet few resources for website, developing apps. Will we "catalogue ourselves to death"?
• Is the detail in catalogue records really being used e.g. authorities?
• Is the question less one of ditching the catalogue than try to make the most of the catalogue and transforming it into something better than what we have now, e.g. using key pieces of data from catalogues for new software development? Why don't we make more use of the cataloguing information that we already have? (Also a VALA paper on leveraging our bibliographic data.)
• Federated search solutions / discovery layers are being implemented but are not not always doing what librarians or library users expect them to do (e.g. initial implementations rarely pick up all suscription databases). How can we better manage the change from catalogue to federated search?
• Catalogues do many things but none of them very well.
• Should we focus on discoverability of unique materials?
• Some vendors are moving to split front end from back end. Are backend systems too complex? There seem to be decades of workarounds to make systems usable.
• Reality is that the vast majority of users are going to Google to start, so why aren't our catalogues discoverable by Google? (Sometimes people get a Trove hit. Maybe the Trove API is a step in the right direction