Toward a Twenty-First Century Catalog

Abstract

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.