Re: Purposes of classification & Information imperialism

Diane,
Thanks for explaining that. You wrote:
"The NLM Catalog was specifically created because the Voyager ILS could
not take advantage of the MeSH tree structures in subject searching."

So the NLM Catalog really does provide the sort of hierarchical approach
some of us are looking for. Given its inability to approach subjects via
those tree structures, what do you perceive as the value of Voyager? Is
there something it can do that the NLM Catalog can't do? Especially
subject-retrieval-wise? Do you think it would be possible to create a
system that could perform the work of both databases?
        --Ted Gemberling

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Diane Boehr
Sent: Monday, June 11, 2007 10:04 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Purposes of classification & Information
imperialism

Ted,

PubMed is a database of article citations, which is why you got such a
large retrieval set.  You can however, do the search Mental Disorders
Diagnosed in Childhood in the NLM Catalog, the Entrez interface to the
NLM bibliographic records, and retrieve 7134 items, because Entrez
automatically  "explodes" a MeSH term and searches all the narrower
terms in a tree unless you explicitly instruct the system not to do
that.

LocatorPlus and the NLM Catalog provide access to the same bibliographic
data, but the NLM Catalog was specifically created because the Voyager
ILS could not take advantage of the MeSH tree structures in subject
searching.  The NLM Catalog is available at www.nlmcatalog.nlm.nih.gov

Diane Boehr
Head of Cataloging, NLM
boehrd_at_mail.nlm.nih.gov

-------------- Original message --------------
From: Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl_at_UAB.EDU>

> > Child Development Disorders, Pervasive is in turn a NT of Mental
> Disorders Diagnosed in Childhood, which is a NT of Mental Disorders.
> Now, the MeSH scope note for Mental Disorders Diagnosed in Childhood
> says: "used for searching: indexers and catalogers apply specifics."
> This apparently means that as a cataloger or indexer of individual
> articles, you do not use this heading. Interestingly, when I tried a
> search for this term in PubMed, another of NLM's databases, I
retrieved
> articles with narrower terms. So PubMed has some mechanism for
> retrieving items with narrower terms when you search for this broad
one.
> If you search for this in NLM's regular "catalog," LocatorPlus, you
get
> nothing, since it's not a term placed on records. I'm not sure how
> helpful it is in this case, because you get 103,000 hits in PubMed.
But
> PubMed also gives you access to the MeSH Database, which shows you the
> hierarchical relations between subjects.
>
>