The Electronic Catalogues and the Requirements to Services of Next Generation

The automatic searching of information meets information needs libraries users in technological chain «user-request-bibliographer- searching information-reply». The most common form is bibliographic searching in an electronic catalogues and another databases which were created and supported by libraries from the 90s of the 20th century. The electronic catalogue has became the central place among the bibliographic resources of any libraries since the time of their recatalogization, and it turned into the main way of bibliographic access to libraries collections, and electronic catalogue transforms either practice of execution users' requests or searching a necessary information on their own. The synonym of electronic catalogue is OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog) − the online catalogue with public access. The basic requirement to OPAC is to be useful for people with various level of information culture without intermediaries, unlike it is in any other information retrieval system. The only effective way in which users could receive help while they use OPAC, is the system itself (reference messages, tips, messages about mistakes and its corrections etc.) and training materials as short instructions on catalogues using.Regardless to practice using of electronic catalogues in libraries, theoretical understanding of this form of access to information is insufficient. Particular, the modern requirements to electronic catalogue have not been developed in the context web technology next generation. The goal of the article is to explore the modern requirements to electronic catalogues as service of next generation. Theoretical analysis and synthesis are research methodology which were used. The librarians were motivated to rethink and rebuild their services and technologies because of high expectations of the web-competent customers and web services 2.0 which accented, on the one hand, personalization and individualism, on the other − creative interaction and exchange particular electronic catalogues first of all by detection and understanding libraries users' needs and behavior. That have led to development the most users oriented library catalogues of the next generation, web catalogues 2.0 or, social OPAC. This model involves expanding the functionality of catalogues and providing access to a variety of content, including annotations, collections, cover art, reviews, users' comments, recommended literatures, readers' ratings, main texts of documents etc. The obtained results of the research can be helpful in improving the existing electronic catalogues of Ukrainian libraries.