The Trouble With Online – is it us?

Roy Tennant’s article for Library Journal about the pitfalls of trying to use an OPAC to find articles online is now itself online. I love it when people tak about disturbing failures of our profession.

We exert much more control over our library catalogs than we do with article indexes, where we are at the mercy of vendors. Since our catalogs are at least partly in our control (automated system vendors largely respond to market demand, and we control how we catalog our items), we need to find ways to enable users to limit searches to full text online. Users rightly expect this ability. Their not being able to do it easily, or at all, is a disturbing failure of our profession.