I agree with you, but Burke's comments are anecdotal evidence that our
tools our users are currently very dissatisfied with the tools we
provide. I think many of have plenty of other anecdotal evidence, and
there's some non-anecdotal evidence too. Thanks to Corey for pointing us
to some of both varieties.
This means everything is NOT Just Fine. Not even close.
I suppose one response would be to try and convince our users that they
OUGHT to be happy with the tools we provide, because the tools we
provide really ARE Just Fine, and as good or better as anything else
they have, and they just don't realize it.
That certainly seems to be a popular tack. It seems an odd one to me,
and one that's doomed to failure. I'd rather try to figure out how to
satisfy them by making our interfaces meet their expectations, not
getting them to change or lower their expectations.
Jonathan
Michael Fitzgerald wrote:
> 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
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Thu May 31 2007 - 07:16:24 EDT