On Mon, 23 Jul 2007, Andrew Nagy wrote:
> 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.
To add to the excellent examples already given by Bryan Baldus and Michael
Fitzgerald, browsing by author can compensate for inconsistent cataloging,
where one author's works end up listed under different versions of an
author's name.
I have seen this in the real world, at the Allen County Public Library,
when I was working at the circ desk at one of their branches over a decade
ago, looking for books by Douglas Coupland. I found all of them except
_Generation X_, which, as I discovered later, was cataloged under *Doug*
Coupland. I didn't think it would be cataloged under a different author
name (I've never heard him referred to as "Doug"), so I didn't try to find
it by title until I mentioned to a coworker that I thought it very odd
that ACPL didn't have that book. If I had never mentioned it to anyone, I
might never have found it. Had I been able to browse by author in their
catalog, I might have discovered it much sooner.
Marijane White
Master's Candidate
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Received on Mon Jul 23 2007 - 20:18:20 EDT