First, let me congratulate you for your hard work that you are doing for
the library community. This is very commendable!
That said... (life's full of "buts" you know?)
I also had some difficulty when clicking on subject headings. One book
I got to in the catalog had a subject heading "history -- philosophy"
(interestingly, this is just one concrete example Thomas Mann, who
Bernhard Eversberg mentions below, has pointed out, showing why we need
"pre-coordinated search strings" and can't *only* break headings up into
individual "facets" - there is a "both-and" that needs to occur here:
"history -- philosophy" and "philosophy -- history" are two very
different things)
When I got to this book, I clicked on the subject heading and I'm not
quite sure what happened next - it seemed like I could only click on one
or the other - "history" or "philosophy", but not "history --
philosophy"... and the results I got were quite jumbled and confusing.
I find it very frustrating when I feel like I have no control over my
searching - and I can't figure out what is happening. If I know what is
happening, I am better able to tailor my search and use the structure
that exists to the fullest advantage.
Nathan Rinne
Media Cataloging Technician
ISD 279 - Educational Service Center (ESC)
11200 93rd Ave. North
Maple Grove, MN. 55369
Work phone: 763-391-7183
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
Sent: Friday, July 20, 2007 12:43 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released
Andrew Nagy schrieb:
>
> I am pleased to announce the release of our Next-Gen library catalog
browser, VuFind. It is now officially open source code under the GPL
and hosted on Sourceforge. We have been working on the application for
quite some time now, almost a year, and for the past few months have
been working with some local schools to test the application and begin
to build some install scripts.
>
All very nice and appealing, thanks for all the effort.
Only - where are the browsing lists of LCSH, authors' names and titles?
Thomas Mann recently made it very clear that no good catalog should
be without the option of browsing. (What VuFind calls "browsing" is
something else: it is related to result sets, not the complete
listings of names and subject headings.)
Here's T.M.'s paper:
"The Peloponnesian War and the Future of Reference, Cataloging, and
Scholarship in Research Libraries"
http://guild2910.org/Peloponnesian%20War%20June%2013%202007.pdf
I understand that VuFind relies on the real catalogs it accesses via
"drivers". So, if a target catalog doesn't have browse lists,
VuFind cannot provide them? Or does it do its own indexing?
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri Jul 20 2007 - 06:05:06 EDT