I've been lurking, but can't resist on this one:
"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."
Eureka has always used author, title, and subject browses--and has always
(at least in Web versions) had check boxes next to the live headings so
users could check more than one heading and get merged results. Technically
not an OPAC, but no, that wasn't a huge programming effort.
walt crawford, counting down the last three days as an RLG employee...
On 6/27/06, Bigwood, David <bigwood_at_lpi.usra.edu> 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 Wed Jun 28 2006 - 12:37:10 EDT