On Friday, July 20, 2007 9:26 AM, Andrew Nagy wrote:
>[On Friday, July 20, 2007 1:43 AM Bernhard Eversberg wrote:]
>> 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.
>
>At the current moment, you can browse by clicking on the
>"Browse the Catalog" link in the footer of the page.
>What that does is views the top 10 of a few categories. Trust
>me when I say: you do not want to have a list of all of the
>authors from your catalog. It will be a mile long. :)
Why is that not what I want? All catalogs should offer an option to browse
alphabetically by title, by author, by subject, both in the bibliographic
records and in the authority records, for example:
<http://authorities.loc.gov/> and <http://catalog.loc.gov/> (on results of
Author/Creator Browse). What seem to be random, unsortable results seem less
useful to me than an organized listing that corresponds to my query. Looking
at Koha [1] and Evergreen [2], keyword searching seems to be the only option
(or at least the only one emphasized). If a user is interested in finding
things relevant to a specific Smith, John (or, a better example might be
trying to find materials relating only to a specific Bush, George+), the
Voyager browse interface is very helpful--the user simply selects the link
for the authorized heading and the catalog displays the appropriate records.
Attempting to do this in the other interfaces seems to bring up a large
number of records, but without any organization. For example, if I happened
to be a fan of Jones, Stephen, B.A. (NAR no 92021772), and was searching
Evergreen to find his dictionary, English-deutsch, German-englisch, based on
the limited searching I did in composing this message, I would have a very
difficult time. In the advanced search screen, Author search, Matches
Exactly, brought up "at least 69" results. The brief results appear to
include only a portion of the authorized heading, so it appears to be
impossible to determine if the records are by my author or by someone
completely different without going into the individual records. Names appear
on the side, listed as "Relevant Authors", but clicking on "Jones, Stephen"
seems to bring up the results of a general author search on those words
(separately, I believe, based on the 1st results not having a heading
"Jones, Stephen", but instead having those words somewhere within the
record). Once I find the record I want, and click on the name, hoping to
find other works by that same person, I am again brought the results of a
general author keyword search across the entire record.
Attempting a similar search on "Jones, Stephen" in VUFind, I received
similar results (though not as confusing, as the first few results appear to
be relevant), with the heading for the author of The life and adventures of
a fly. appearing in the results disply to be the same as that of Harbor of
Refuge, ..., even though going into the records shows that they have
different headings. Attempting a search on author Bush, George, the first
title is "Looking forward", followed by Illustrations of the Holy
Scriptures. Without going into the Staff (MARC) view, the user is not given
much indication that these are by 2 different people. Clicking on the author
heading on the results list resulted in nothing happening, but that may be
due to my browser/computer.
I don't have access to the original article they cite, but in LRTS 51(3), p.
190-201, the article Searching titles with initial articles in library
catalogs / by Clement Arsenault and Elaine Menard, on p. 198, endnote 16
discusses a "Web catalog analysis by Halcoussis and colleagues [that]
revealed that when asked to rate the level of satisfaction regarding
organization of a Web catalog based on a variety of criteria, 'browse-title'
ranked as one of the highest search types, ... while 'keywords-in-title'
ranked as the lowest search type." Citation: Dennis Halcoussis et al., "An
Empirical Analysis of Web Catalog User Experiences," Information Technology
and Libraries 21, no. 4 (2002): 148-57.
[1] <http://zoomopac.liblime.com/>
[2] <http://open-ils.org/>
Thank you,
Bryan Baldus
Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses
1-800-323-4241x460
bryan.baldus_at_quality-books.com
Received on Mon Jul 23 2007 - 06:45:00 EDT