An overview of catalog design problems in resource discovery

Discusses some of the problems designers face in building catalogs in large networks and relates them back to the resource discovery problem. Currently many catalogs tend to be built in an ad hoc fashion ‐ which leads to a great variety in the quality of publicly accessible network catalogs. Furthermore, the research surrounding these catalogs tends to focus on narrow technical issues ‐ resulting in difficult‐to‐use catalogs. Addresses this problem by providing a usability framework based on the library science and human computer interaction literature, and demonstrates some of those principles via an example of a prototype. Results are interesting to resource discovery tool developers in that a framework for understanding the general resource discovery problem is provided and some techniques for dealing with those problems are presented.