I'll toss in one note: Mary Grenci raises an excellent point, perhaps
indirectly: Yes, I think you can demonstrate that lots of online catalog
searches are not for known items: They're for "what you have by this
author." (Where "you have" means "at this library, right now")
And library catalogs do these searches pretty well, although there may be
room for improvement in most cases. A lot of them (I believe) even sort the
results in a way that makes sense to most users, e.g. alphabetic by title.
[You know, I'll bet that a majority of library users also know what an
"author" is...]
walt crawford
On 6/13/06, Mary Grenci <mgrenci_at_uoregon.edu> wrote:
>
> ...portions deleted...
If, on the other hand, I'm looking for anything from a particular author
> (my more usual search since I'm looking for new stuff to read) I get a
> mess. Yes, I'm sure all the things in the system by that author are
> *somewhere* in the numerous pages, but they're certainly not in a
> logical order. They're interspersed among other things that must
> have been pulled up for some reason, although I can't always tell
> why. Again, this is more true if I forget to use quotes, but it's
> generally a mess even if I remember. The sort options are also less than
> helpful.
>
>
>
> Mary
>
>
> Mary Grenci
> University of Oregon Libraries
> mgrenci_at_uoregon.edu
>
Received on Tue Jun 13 2006 - 13:29:33 EDT