Introduction

Hi everyone, I'm so late in introducing myself that I had to get Mark to send me another invitation to post to the 'blog ....

Anyways, I'm Deb Shapiro, and I am an instructor at the UW-Madison School of Library & Information Studies, SLIS. I teach cataloging and metadata and organization of information. I've been looking at NextGen catalogs sort of from the performance/usability side; how do they search, can you understand the results, what kind of "bling" do they have (reader recommendations, cover art, tagging, etc.). I'm coming to camp in the hopes of getting a firmer grip on how they work; the under the hood stuff. My hidden agenda is that I am looking forward to when it is that I will be able I can stop teaching cataloging students the MARC format! <grin>

My favorite reading so far on NextGen catalogs is Marshall Breeding's Library Technology Reports from last summer: Next-generation library catalogs / Marshall Breeding, Library technology reports, v. 43, no. 4

And I'd really rather be teaching cooking, or art than cataloging ...