ATG Book of the Week: Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog

Title: Scholarly Practice, Participatory Design and the eXtensible Catalog

Editors: Nancy Fried Foster, Katie Clark, Kornelia Tancheva, and Rebekah Kilzer

ISBN: 13: 978-0-8389-8574-8

Price: Softcover: $40

Imprint: Chicago: ACRL, 2011, 176 pages.

As part of the development of eXtensible Catalog (XC), a project sponsored by the University of Rochester’s River Campus Libraries, four institutions conducted 80 interviews and numerous workshops to understand how researchers learn about, acquire, and use scholarly resources.  In this volume, members of the project team report on key findings of the user research that was done at these four institutions: Cornell University, Ohio State University, the University of Rochester, and Yale University.  The value of including library users and technology specialists from many disciplines in the software design and development process is explored.  The resulting eXtensible Catalog is “a set of open-source applications that provides access to resources across a range of databases, metadata schemas, and standards.”