A Contribution to Improve the Children's Catalogue of the Public Library

Abstract

This paper presents a proposal whose main goal is to contribute for the improvement of the children’s catalogue of the Portuguese Public Library. The context of the communicational paradigm of the contemporary library is described as a foundation that justifies an evolution of the concept of catalogue and purports the emergence of the concept of catalogue for children. The catalogues, collections and the facilities and equipment infrastructures available to young publics in 115 Portuguese public libraries are identified and characterized. The survey is then used as a starting point for our proposal that suggests the implementation of an ontology that, by acting upon the catalogue's substructure, will reveal relations between objects and improve the dialogue space idealized for the children's catalogue of the Public Library.