If the search was routed through an authority control process, you would
be presented with a list of "Doe, John" names divided so that each item
was actually a different John Doe--separated by date of birth or whatever.
That said, checking things off on a list is always a nice capability. I
used a catalog once that let you edit your results list before printing
it, and liked it a lot. Handy for teachers creating lists for their
students, as well.
Jane Myers, Cataloger
Westlake Porter Public Library
Westlake, Ohio
Bigwood, David wrote:
>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.
>---------------
>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 - 10:42:32 EDT