Ted,
Right now, Voyager does a better job with authority control of names and titles, leading you directly from a cross reference to the proper heading. In the NLM Catalog, you can search the authorities, but it's a separate search. Voyager is the only source for the holdings information. The following link describes the differences between the two databases in more detial: http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/locatorplus.html
I'm sure it would be possible to design a system that could do both, but I don't see the vendors or library community heading in that direction. There seems to be a lot of talk recently about decoupling discovery and inventory. The vision seems to be that we keep our current ILS for our specific holdings information and then stick a more effective search interface on top of that--perhaps one that searches more than just what the library "owns."
Diane Boehr
-------------- Original message --------------
From: Ted P Gemberling <tgemberl_at_UAB.EDU>
> 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
> >
Received on Wed Jun 13 2007 - 19:09:01 EDT