> -----Original Message-----
> From: Bryan Baldus [mailto:bryan.baldus_at_quality-books.com]
> Sent: Monday, July 23, 2007 8:58 AM
> To: 'Next generation catalogs for libraries'; Andrew Nagy
> Subject: RE: [NGC4LIB] Open Source OPAC - VUFind Beta Released
>
> 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
I struggle to understand why someone would want to "browse" by author. Viewing a list of names won't help you find what you are looking for unless you know the exact, or close to, the name of the author. In which case you would just do an author search for that person and then in the results you can narrow down to the exact author you want.
For example, let's say you are looking for something by Walt Whitman. You do an author search for "whitman" and then you see that Whitman, Walt is the most popular author in that list. You can then narrow down by Whitman, Walt and find all of his works. Or with VUFind you have the option of clicking on Whitman, Walt in the search results and view an author page on Walt Whitman.
Is this near what you are describing?
Andrew
Received on Mon Jul 23 2007 - 13:11:52 EDT