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Report Examines Rearchitecting OPAC and Delivery of Bibliographic Services

Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University of California, Final Report, December 2005 (80 pages, PDF).

  • Executive Summary: “…The continuing proliferation of formats, tools, services, and technologies has upended how we arrange, retrieve, and present our holdings. Our users expect simplicity and immediate reward and Amazon, Google, and iTunes are the standards against which we are judged. Our current systems pale beside them. The current Library catalog is poorly designed for the tasks of finding, discovering, and selecting the growing set of resources available in our libraries…We need to look seriously at opportunities to centralize and/or better coordinate services and data, while maintaining appropriate local control, as a way of reducing effort and complexity and of redirecting resources to focus on improving the user experience. Books are not going away. Traditional information formats are, however, being used in combination with a multitude of new and evolving formats. It is our responsibility to assist our users in finding what they need without demanding that they acquire specialized knowledge or select among an array of ‘silo’ systems whose distinctions seem arbitrary.”
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