Much has been said about the quality of catalog records in this
discussion, and the general idea seems to be that other people are
doing it better than we are.
I have to stop and question this. Is anyone really doing this better?
People regularly point to Amazon as doing this better than we do, but
I'm not convinced. Amazon can be great if you want to find a specific
book.. but our catalogs are great at that too. Amazon is far more
FRBR friendly, I'll agree. But FRBR seems much more focused on the
known item search.
Try doing a typical keyword search for a topic in Amazon. Are your
results precise? Probably not. I just did a few searches that I'd
helped people with at the reference desk, using the terms they tried
in my catalog, and I didn't get any better results in Amazon than the
patrons got in our OPAC.
I wonder how much of Amazon's ability to impress is built on the sheer
number of items they have. Any search will return something. And if
you're just looking for something, that's good enough. And what about
a scholarly, exhaustive search for literature on a topic? Would the
search required for that in Amazon's catalog be any less complex than
in an OPAC? I would venture to say it would be more complex, because
you would have to work out ways to exclude concepts from a keyword
search that LCSH do by their very design.
Browsing isn't any better. Clicking randomly through their list, I
went to Colombian history. There are 1,353 and I can't drill down any
further. My catalog doesn't have nearly that many items for Colombian
history, but there are at least a dozen sub-divisions that provide
more specific data for users.
The niggly little bits provide the specificity. As Candy said, there
are ways to encode data that could really enrich the catalog if they
were being used, but they're often not. Catalogers don't bother
putting in data because their local systems don't use it. And vendors
don't bother putting in the functionality because catalogers aren't
putting the data in.
What system will change that? Without a concerted effort to put in
the niggly little bits--without taking the time and effort to encode
the information we want to use--no catalog, no metadata scheme, and no
set of cataloging rules will improve what we have. You can't search or
sort data the computer doesn't have.
--
Mark Sandford
Special Formats Cataloger
William Paterson University
(973)270-2437
sandfordm1_at_wpunj.edu
Received on Tue May 01 2007 - 07:24:22 EDT