Karen Calhoun and other colleagues have produced a report on catalog data from user and library points of view.
The findings suggest two traditions of information organization at work–one from librarianship and the other from the Web. Librarians’ perspectives about data quality remain highly influenced by their profession’s classical principles of information organization, while end users’ expectations of data quality arise largely from their experiences of how information is organized on popular Web sites. What is needed now is to integrate the best of both worlds in new, expanded definitions of what “quality” means in library online catalogs. [Online catalogs: what users and librarians want]
