Roger wrote:
A second objection I have to browsing may not apply to all libraries,
but when browsing "Doe, John" throws up 30 or more different author
headings for him, many of them not author-title headings but simply
variants of the author heading differentiated solely by punctuation,
extra spaces, inclusion or not of middle initials, or different ways of
displaying birth and death dates, caused by the vagaries of cataloguing
rules changes over many decades as well as rogue cataloguer
inconsistencies, and these headings each have to be searched
individually (i.e., there's no way of ticking off all the relevant ones
and then combining them in a single merged display of individual
catalogue records), it's a near-criminal waste of users' time. I know
this isn't a problem with the principle of browse searching, but it sure
is a problem of one-the-ground browsing.
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Yes! Why not have check boxes next to the list items? I've never seen
that, yet it would make using the indexes much easier. It surely is not
a major programmming problem, I seen them plenty of other places. Maybe
then the indexes will get more use and we won't have to hide them. I
hope the Koha and Evergreen folks are reading this.
Sincerely,
David Bigwood
bigwood_at_lpi.usra.edu
Lunar & Planetary Institue
http://www.lpi.usra.edu/library/whats_new.shtml
Catalogablog
http://catalogablog.blogspot.com
Received on Tue Jun 27 2006 - 10:18:31 EDT