Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> Karen Coyle schrieb:
>
>> browsing means a kind of wandering, some movement among things. One kind
>> of that movement can be the alphabetical movement through bibliographic
>> headings (or "access points" as RDA is now calling them). This is what
>> we are most familiar with, but I only find it useful in very limited
>> circumstances.
> No reason to discard it as a required feature of OPACs. As Thomas Mann
> makes clear, pre-coordinated subject headings (a) are a necessary
> concept and (b) need a browse index.
No, but there's also no reason to declare it the ONLY kind of browsing.
That was my point. The VUFind catalog uses the term browse for another
type of browsing. Until we (well, our users) get more experience with
this, we shouldn't reject it because it's not the traditional browse.
I'm sure the catalog can be designed to do both. But I do consider what
they have done a type of browse.
And I should also say that the one thing of Mann's that I read, his
comment to the LC FoBC task force, wasn't very convincing to me. So I'm
afraid that citing him doesn't give an argument weight. (Although, if
you provide a link, I'll go and see for myself.)
>
>> I want to browse by other aspects: by "sameness" (from the
>> most alike to the least like my starting point), by "references"
>> (following citations that link texts), and by classification. These
>> browses would be more meaningful to me and would help me find
>> relationships between works that don't happen to be alphabetical.
>>
> Classification browsing also needs an alphanumeric index, or two:
> one for the terms (to find a class) and one for the class numbers.
Not necessarily. It's a matter of presentation, and there is no reason
why the presentation has to be linear. Classification should lend itself
to presentation in a visual map, with hierarchy and other relationships.
>
> I understand that speakers of English are in less of a need for
> alphabetical browsing. If your language is more inflected or
> suffix-rich, then your attitude will be different. Then you also
> find Google's lack of truncation more of a handicap.
But in that case isn't the issue about words, not headings? I'm not sure
how a heading browse helps you for a word that isn't at the beginning of
the heading.
BTW, the recently announced book catalog at the Internet Archive
(http://demo.openlibrary.org) uses stemming software (probably focused
on English) for its keyword searches. I'd be interested to hear if
people find it useful, because I find it to be a real nuisance. Ditto
the automatic stemming and other modifications that Google now uses. I
find it to be annoying when I'm looking for names and they pull up other
names that are similarly spelled (Michelle, Michele). I'm sure that at
times it has helped me, but I find that I end up going to Advanced
Search mainly to turn that off by putting the terms in quotes. There
should be an easy way to turn stemming on and off. It's not appropriate
for every search.
kc
>
> B. Eversberg
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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Received on Mon Jul 23 2007 - 08:20:11 EDT