The new front-end to the NCSU library catalog is likely to get a lot of attention in the library community. (And, well it should). It’s certainly a great example of searching a library catalog. I immediately liked the way that it displayed search results. Yet, I think that libraries are not likely to rush out and adopt the same solution as NCSU.

For most academic libraries, even the larger ones, the third-party e-commerce approach taken by NCSU is likely to be cost and resource prohibitive. Most libraries are likely better off to wait for other solutions, either from their system vendors or OCLC. ILS vendors are in the process of upgrading their OPAC systems.

But as Lorcan Dempsey so elegantly discusses in his weblog on libraries, services, and networks, “the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment”. The full post by Lorcan and the rest of his writings are certainly worth reading closely.

Wandering around Google early this morning I stumbled across an interesting PowerPoint presentation, by a talented librarian invovled in developing the new NCSU catalog front-end, which states that users

learn to go to Amazon first and then back to the library catalog when they know what they want

I think that’s pretty much true. I often have done it myself. Or, even more, gone from the catalog to Amazon in order to check the reviews or get more information about the book before wandering up into the stacks.

Reading that statement reminded me of a recent entry by Lorcan about a person at the University of Huddlesfield who had developed a greasemonkey script that automatically would search the library’s catalog from within Amazon and indicate to you on the Amazon page itself if the library held that item. I installed the greasemonkey script, tried it myself on amazon.co.uk and was really impressed. It may not be fully ready for deployment to a broad user base but it’s certainly the right direction as a tool that many users would find very helpful.

Lorcan suggests that such a tool could scale up to multiple libraries, which is a good point. I also wonder how it could be used to initiate interlibrary loan requests for items found in Amazon not held by one’s local library. Understanding the possibilities of such tools can lead to thinking about library services in entirely different ways. OpenURL resolvers and bookmarklets go a long way also towards these services even though many (perhaps most) libraries utilizing OpenURL are still not exploiting its full potential.

Libraries have to decide where to focus their staffing resources and their money. Developing new front-ends for library catalogs and databases while continually revising a library’s web site in order to make it more appealing to users are time consuming efforts. At the same time, developing new Web-based services using emerging technologies are also time consuming. Most libraries will need to choose where to focus their attention. Perhaps, it’s time that more libraries think about how to get into the user’s environment rather than attempting to perfect the library’s own environment.