Part Two: Buy, Hack or Build
Second speaker is Pete Bell, co-founder of Endeca Solutions, covering faceted browsing/searching. Good quote at the top of a slide showing companies: 'for profit' libraries. Meaning that they can teach us lots, they're doing the same work and they're doing it better in a lot of ways. An interesting observation: both the morning presenters, while not librarians, but are here, presenting to mostly librarians about library-related stuff - they have NO concept of how current library catalogs work. BOTH have referred to card catalogs - Yes, they mean cards. Someone in the crowd made a great point that librarians are no good at communicating the level of sophistication of the systems they do use - I would say that's because they're tools, built on outdated algorithms that they were trained on. In the end, they don't explain it because they don't understand it - they only understand how it as a tool, not as something they built. He shows the browse function at Barnes and Noble Browse. Truth be told, I had trouble following, and if I do, users will… he's moving on now, though, I'll try harder. Ooops, nope, he lost me. I never even got the URL… Wait, fight breaking out. One person saying that current OPACs are good enough.
