At 11:44 PM 5/30/2007, Ross wrote:
>Out of curiosity, how does the average person navigate this:
>http://orlabs.oclc.org/Identities/find?fullName=%22michael+fitzgerald%22
>
>over this:
>http://amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw/104-2774713-7821547?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=%22michael+fitzgerald%22
Well, I'm number 5 at OCLC, for what that's worth.
However, I would imagine the average person looks at the entry for a
*book* and asks a simple question like, "Has this author written
anything else?" There's a very clearly defined answer to that
question which WorldCat (the real version) supplies by a link at the
author field. I just checked - it works perfectly in my particular
case. I am skeptical that the average person (or even the very odd
person) would want the result of such a click to produce *every*
author or combination of authors who have parts of the first and last
names specified. If a system can't properly answer that simple
question, then it needs improvement.
I don't know why the free WorldCat doesn't use this implementation,
but I guess this is a prime example of "you get what you pay for." If
your institution has access to the real WorldCat, I would never
advise you to use the free one instead. If you don't have access,
then I suppose free is better than nothing, but you might waste a lot of time.
I tried this same test in LC and in a couple of college library OPACs
and all were able to differentiate. If someone has a way to do this
(even a kludgy solution) in Amazon, I would be interested to know
about it, if only for my own shopping satisfaction.
Here's a consideration that may or may not be of significance -
Amazon and other vendors could well have an aversion to showing only
one record and filtering out the rest. They are trying to get your
money. They want you to see all kinds of (possibly irrelevant)
results so that you might buy something. Maybe you will be distracted
from your intended search and go off surfing links - they don't
really care *what* you buy so long as you *buy*. I imagine that
Google is the same way. More results (whether accurate or not) are in
their best interests. (Though I'm not saying that they think that
more is better in every case, not at all.)
Mike
mike at jazzdiscography.com
www.jazzdiscography.com
Received on Thu May 31 2007 - 00:19:22 EDT