Department of “Thanks for pointing that out!”

From a conference report in Ariadne:

It was asserted that online public access catalogues (OPACs) must be rapidly transformed from antiquated browsing interfaces with crude search tools useful only for locating specified materials into intuitive, aesthetically pleasing search tools which produce high-quality search results and aggregate similar resources, in a similar way to commercial book retailers.

Oh, really?

OK. I’ll slot that in next week sometime.

Wouldn’t it be cool if….

Much talk on some of the library lists and blogs I read about personalized recommendation services, and about the tension between patrons who want to preserve their borrowing history and libraries who need to protect patron confidentiality.

So wouldn’t it be cool to put the tools in the hands of patrons to manage their own borrowing history? LibraryThing provides recommendations based on the books you include in your library, and allows you to add books to your library by importing files with embedded ISBNs. So adding ISBNs to the “My account” information in the catalogue would be a simple way to enable that. It’s probably do-able, but it would clutter up the display for everyone else, and the point of it wouldn’t be clear to most users.

It would be even cooler if the library catalogue allowed you to export your current “My Account” information. Especially if you could use that export capability to populate LibraryThing and Zotero or Refworks or whatever other citation manager you use.

It would be even cooler if — at the time of chargeout — the system would automatically e-mail you a “receipt” with enough information about your items to allow import.

It might be even cooler if clicking on a link to an electronic resource in the catalogue could be treated as a chargeout, and would generate a similar e-mail receipt. But on the other hand, that might just freak people out.