Miskatonic University Press

After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?

talks

On Friday 15 October 2010, at the Access 2010 conference about libraries and technology, my York University colleague Adam Taves and I are giving a talk called "After Launching Search and Discovery, Who Is Mission Control?"

Reference librarians are whiny and demanding.

Systems librarians are arrogant and rude.

Users are clueless and uninformed.

A new discovery layer means that they need to collaborate to build it and then — the next step — integrate it into teaching and learning. How should we (reference librarians, systems people, and users) work together to better exploit the possibilities of open source systems so we can focus on discovery and understanding instead of the mechanics of searching?

We'd love to hear any thoughts you have about this. At WILU 2010 (WILU being the major Canadian conference on libraries and information literacy), Adam asked some people these three questions:

  1. What do you want from a search and discovery layer?
  2. What do you want from your systems people?
  3. What should they want from you?

What are your answers? Leave a comment, send me email, say something to me on Identi.ca or on Twitter, or if you see this mentioned on a mailing list, follow up there. Have you been through this process before? Been on the IT side, and had to put up with whiny and demanding librarians? Been on the public services side, and had to put up with rude and arrogant developers? Been a user who isn't actually clueless and uninformed?

(Mita Williams posted about this in June: Information tool literacy. Thanks, Mita.)