Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

Karen Schneider’s latest post on the ALA TechSource Blog, "How OPACs Suck, Part 1: Relevance Rank (Or the Lack of It)," points out some very real problems with library OPACs in terms of a lack of adequate relevancy ranking.  From her post:

Relevance ranking is just one of many basic search-engine
functionalities missing from online catalogs. NCSU worked around it by
adding a search engine on top of its catalog database. But the
interesting questions are: Why don’t online catalog vendors offer true
search in the first place? and Why we don’t demand it?

Tomorrow I’m giving a presentation at our library’s All Staff Day about the future of e-services, and one of the things I’m predicting is that we’ll see some very specific massive changes in the way OPACs look and work in the next few years.  This relevancy ranking issue is one of those changes I’d like to see happen.  I agree with Karen that this is something that librarians should be demanding…not simply wishing for.