FEATURE Information discovery


Time to call time on the library catalogue?


The way that researchers find information is changing, and libraries need to change with it, as discussions at the UKSG meeting in April revealed. Siân Harris reports


T


witter commentators on Guilhem Chalancon’s presentation to this year’s UKSG conference observed an interesting point: not once in the half hour that he spoke about the tools that he uses to find information for his research did he mention library catalogues.


Chalancon is a PhD student at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) and the University of Cambridge, UK. In his talk he presented a detailed account of his approach to finding and organising reference resources more effectively: ‘The key information is rare relative to all the information we absorb. It would be good to maximise the focus on the really useful information. There is lots of innovation to help. From an end-user standpoint we need to adopt new habits, avoid distractions and build workflows to help manage this information.’ Chalancon’s typical workflow has three key steps. The first is to identify relevant information, and spot and save it. The next step is to digest the information, which includes annotating and tagging, assigning to a project or theme. The final stage is to use the information, which includes a second read of the material and citing it. He noted that there is a difference between tagging and active reading. To help with his information management


he uses a range of tools at different stages of the process. These include search tools such as Google Scholar and reference management tools such as Mendeley and ReadCube. He observed that there


12 Research Information JUNE/JULY 2014


Simone Kortekaas, project manager, innovation and development at the library of the University of Utrecht


are some key recurring principles of good tools, including minimalist and responsive design and cloud synchronisation. The absence


of the library catalogue in


Chalancon’s research process was noteworthy but not unique. Simone Kortekaas, project manager, innovation and development at the library of the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, noted in her presentation how, while traffic to the library’s


journal holdings had grown, the proportion of access to these holdings via the library catalogue had dropped dramatically. Instead, patrons were increasingly coming to library resources via discovery services, reference-sharing tools, databases that the library subscribes to and, perhaps most notably, Google Scholar. This trend was echoed from the other side of the information-provision equation: a delegate from


@researchinfo www.researchinformation.info


Procter Photography


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