This essay offers suggestions to make online public access catalogs (OPACs) less idiosyncratic and more usable. Discussion covers qualitative difference between online catalog and predecessors, challenge of debunking assumptions, skills for success, maintaining an instructional perspective, catalog development for the people by the people, and the…

Presents Checkland's soft systems methodology, discusses it in terms of the systems approach, and illustrates how it was used to relate evidence of user survey to practical problems of library management. Difficulties in using methodology are described and implications for library management and information science research are presented. (8…