At 08:40 PM 5/30/2007, Corey wrote:
>I found this incredibly interesting:
>http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma12004.html
Lots of heat but no light.
He's claiming Amazon is better than the catalog? Oh, give me a break
- Amazon doesn't even have the first clue about basic authority
control - my book is right there with those of plenty of other
similarly named authors. There's nothing I can do to limit it. In
fact, when you click on a specific author name, it gets even *worse*
- showing the results of a search for "Michael" AND "Fitzgerald", for
example, which could (and does) mean "James Patterson, Alton
Fitzgerald White, and Michael Cumpstey" among nearly 200 totally
unrelated results. If this fellow doesn't understand something as
basic as that, is there really any compelling reason to take his
arguments all that seriously?
LSCH "long ago slid into uselessness" - define useless, please. He
doesn't understand the concept of assigning the most specific
appropriate subject heading either. But he says Amazon's subjects are
no better. I think the Endeca projects have shown conclusively that
there is plenty of usefulness in LCSH.
"Exotic combinations of keywords and authors" - you want specific,
you need to be specific.
And get this - oh my heavens, he actually uses the bibliographies in
books to find *other related sources*! Can you believe it? What the
hell did he think they were *put* there for? Now I'm starting to tire
of his off-the-cuff hyperbole.
So he's having trouble keeping up with what's being published - seems
to me that there are plenty of journals that maintain excellent
"recently published" lists. I can't speak for the system at
Swarthmore, but I've seen plenty of evidence that librarians and
bibliographers put together webpages for just such a purpose. Has he
even bothered to ask a librarian? What does he think *they* were put
there for?
Actually, never mind - what is this?
http://trilogy.brynmawr.edu/cgi-bin/newbooks/newbook_choose.pl
He could even get an RSS feed of it. Looks pretty darn useful to me.
This article was written in 2004. I hope he isn't still ranting about
the lack of such a resource. Amazing that with such flawed
foundations this guy is getting any attention.
This over-the-top stuff ("burn the catalog"; "utterly erase our
existing academic catalogs") just doesn't hold water. As far as I am
concerned, he needs a copy of the Mann book and a stern talking-to
from the humanities reference librarian. If it were up to me, I'd ask
for a written apology to the entire Swarthmore library system.
Mike
mike at jazzdiscography.com
www.jazzdiscography.com
Received on Wed May 30 2007 - 19:29:04 EDT