Why Library Catalogs are not as user-friendly as Search Engines? 

Traditional library card catalogues are data-centered ‘handicrafts’ with lots of rigid

rules controlling their access and descriptions and hence naturally very much under-used. Since the legacy is continued in modern Online Public Access Catalogues(OPACs) as early OPACs functioned like digital version of card catalogs, end-usersalso continued to admire library card catalogs and OPACs as ‘handicrafts’ than understand and use them extensively. Whatever limited use made of them is morefor searching known-items and/or as adjuncts to library circulation system than as aninformation retrieval tool. Interestingly, many studies have reported that largemajority of users prefer to browsing books on the shelves of libraries than browsinglibrary catalogues.Search Engines intuitively captured the imagination of end-users with many simpleand easy to understand features in information discovery and access. User-centricdesign, self-service, seamlessness, natural language search, fuzzy search, autosuggestion of search terms, spell-check, auto-plurals, auto-word truncation, showingsimilar items/pages, relevance ranking, popularity tracking, interaction and feedback,provision for varieties of filtering and browsing, etc. are the features users gotacquainted from Search Engines. They never expected users to undergo informationliteracy trainings and not even to have a search strategy or prepare a complexsearch query, but allowed users to enter whatever natural language words come to their mind in a search box with a ‘search’ or ‘go’ button adjacent to it to click and

execute without the burden of knowing field tags, Boolean operators or datastructure and so on. As a matter of fact, unlike OPACs, by default they did notrestrict the search terms to select fields even though that is an option available andthis feature greatly increased the relevance of search results. Search Engines wentto the extent of automatically deciding, as soon as two or more keywords are entered in the search box, either to execute as a phrase search or Boolean ‘AND’ search. Some clever Search Engines execute both in sequence, i.e., first as a phrase searchand then as Boolean AND search if the resulting hits are below certain pre-specifiednumber.Once the search results appeared, Search Engines effectively capture the attentionof users with relevance ranked presentation, option to change the criteria for ranking like ‘latest first’ (i.e., by date of publication). The display of results by Search Engines is more convenient and comfortable than that from OPACs. Search Engines guideusers, in a simple way, not only to modify the search and re-execute with the search

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box and keywords intact but also enable them to narrow down the search resultthrough various filtering options like subject, author, format, date, language, etc.They also liberally allow users to play with result pages and items by moving backand forth and marking and demarking, downloading, e-mailing, sharing, exportingand processing and doing many more things. In addition, users can access and collate similar records with ‘more like this’ feature for a given author or subjects Onewelcome development in the recent past is that library OPACs are trying to imitateSearch Engines and introduce external links to images, full text, TOC, summaries,author information and reviews of retrieved documents.Classification scheme, cataloging code and controlled vocabulary (thesaurus) are

the three ‘sacred tools’ which pre-occupied librarians more than anything else over acentury. But Librarians did not bother to check the acceptance of these tools by endusers. Present day Search Engines do have thesauri and taxonomies in the backand help users to map their natural language keywords so that end users areimmensely benefited but without taxing them to know what is happening (or how it ishappening) in the back. Some of the rigid cataloging rules, the process ofdelineating metadata elements as access, descriptive and administrative dataelements, are no more relevant on Web. As such, AACR, MARC and otherstandards have appeared more as limitations from user perspective than a user-friendly service. On the other hand, Search Engines have effectively repurposedthese data elements to add value to service and grown with the changed andexpected user behaviour. Library catalogs are also changing, but slowly. Forexample, the extent of data mining done by Search Engines cannot be comparedwith Circulation and OPAC modules of any library management software.In a nutshell, rule-based data-centric design of OPACs turned out to be Librarian-friendly; where as user-centric design of Search Engines are immensely user-friendly. OPACs are no match to Search Engines as for as user-empowerment andminimal consumption-skill requirements are concerned. Of late, Federated SearchEngines, in their effort to provide one-stop digital service to users, face challenges inintegrating diverse OPACs and different sets of databases within the same OPAC.It is heartening to note that the new J-Gate 2 has many features of a powerfulSearch Engine and is forging ahead to enhance it soon with even Federated SearchEngine features to search in one go all your digital resources including OPAC