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Library catalogs have represented stagnant technology for close to twenty years. Moving toward a next-generation catalog, North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries purchased Endeca's Information Access Platform to give its users relevance-ranked keyword search results and to leverage the rich metadata trapped in the MARC record to enhance collection browsing. This paper discusses the new functionality that has been enabled, the implementation process and system architecture, assessment of the new catalog's performance, and future directions.
Editor's Note: This article was submitted in honor of the fortieth anniversaries of LITA and ITAL.
The promise of online catalogs has never been realized. For more than a decade, the profession either turned a blind eye to problems with the catalog or accepted that it is powerless to fix them. Online catalogs were, once upon a time, "the most widely-available retrieval system and the first that many people encounter."1 Needless to say, that is no longer the case. Libraries cannot force users into those "closed," "rigid," and "intricate" online catalogs.2 As a result, the catalog has become for many students a call-number lookup system, with resource discovery happening elsewhere. Yet, while the catalog is only one of many discovery tools, covering a proportionately narrower spectrum of information resources than a decade ago, it is still a core library service and the only tool for accessing and using library book collections.
In recognition of the severity of the catalog problem, particularly in the area of keyword searching, and seeing that Integrated Library System (ILS) vendors were not addressing it, the North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries elected to replace its keyword search engine with software developed for major commercial Web sites. The software, Endeca's Information Access Platform (IAP), offers state-of-the-art retrieval technologies.
Early online catalogs
Larson and Large and Beheshti summarize an extensive body of literature on online public access catalogs (OPACs) and related information-retrieval topics through 1997.3 The literature has tapered off since then; however, as promising innovations failed to be realized in commercial systems, mainstream OPAC technology stabilized, and the library community's collective attention was turned to the Web.
First generation online catalogs (1960s and 1970s) provided the same access points as the card catalog, dropping the user into a pre-coordinate index.4 The first online catalogs, byproducts...