KohaCon19 - Curation of information

by Donna Bachowski on Jun 20, 2019

Curation, Discovery, and Lists

While all of the sessions at KohaCon19 were interesting, one that really was thought provoking for me was Ken Chad’s keynote “Community, openness and directions for library technology.”

You can view the presentation here and the slide deck is available here.

One of the elements he spoke about is curation versus searching. The concept of “discovery” within the library is of great importance, and I believe that curation plays a significant role in that. Our patrons don’t always know what they are looking for, so searching can be really difficult, where as curation and discovery help us get our patrons to what they want.

And this where libraries are experts! Patrons need someone to help put the good stuff in front of them. Chad spent some time talking about Reading/Resource List management as a form of curation. While libraries have for eons created bibliographies and “If you like this, try this” lists, do we tell the patrons why those items have been included, or do we ask our patrons to just take our word for it?

And yes, there is software that will do this sort of thing, and there are commercial products (Novelist, Books and Authors, Goodreads, etc) that will tell patrons the why of the recommendation, but you risk having patrons leave the catalog or library website. We have an amazing Library Management System - let’s make use of it, and save our patrons extra clicks.

So here’s my challenge to you: how can the Koha lists function be improved to make it easier to create curated lists with supporting information? There is a long standing enhancement request in Bugzilla - won't you take just a minute and add your thoughts/support to it?