Tuesday 18 October 2011

Enriched Content in a ILS

Prompted by this week's course discussion, I got to thinking about the implimentation of enriched content in an ILS, and realized that I personally don't like it. 

Now, maybe I'm just a technological luddite who remembers using a card catalog, but I often find that additional content often obscures the information I am looking for.  I don't want a scanned picture of the cover art, I want the subject keywords.   Or maybe it's just a case of too much information in one spot.

Many libraries have yet to use extensive enriched content. And I have to wonder if it's truly needed.  I can see the benefits; most definitely, especially on material such as user-reviews, images, and excerpts.  For digital media, or when you are browsing a catalog for an inter-library loan, enriched content may help you decide if that is the media you want.But at times it seems that those are emphasized -over- the basic bibliographic material of the item, which, at least for me, distracts me from the basic information I am looking for. 

1 comment:

  1. Thoughtful post; it really is the downside to enrichment when you can't even see the standard bibliographic information. I find Amazon is like that, especially if I'm looking for publishing data. I myself like many of the elements of content enrichment - if they're displayed well.

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