Eric,
I agree that we shouldn't limit access to books only. What we do need to
think about, however, is what the user understands about the scope of a
search. One of the difficulties we had in the U Cal union catalog was
that there were a few, very few, small, specialized libraries that
included *some* articles in their catalogs, which then got added to the
union catalog. Users who happened upon one of these journal article
records seemed to be fully willing to believe that the catalog contained
*all* journal articles, even though only these few turned up.
So although the library can probably claim (and users will believe) that
the catalog contains all of the books that the library owns, how do we
express to the user what journal articles they can expect to find in the
same search with those books? Or maybe a better way to ask the question
is: how do users know when they have gotten all that they can from the
catalog and need to move along to other resources?
kc
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> I assert that library "catalogs" need to include content beyond
> books. [1]
>
> More specifically, I assert library "catalogs" need to include
> article-level content. Apparently in the early 20th century some
> library catalogs did contain article-level content, but maintaining
> all of those cards for all of those articles was just not scalable.
> This was an opening for H.W. Wilson, his various indexes, and an
> example of library outsourcing. [2]
>
> Article-level content abounds on the Internet. Through the use of
> things like but not limited to OAI-PMH it is possible to harvest and
> include into your "catalog" article-level data (and even the articles
> themselves). OAISter is probably the biggest example. It is an index
> to about 10,000,000 items accessible via OAI including articles,
> theses & dissertations, images, manuscripts, etc.:
>
> http://www.oaister.org/
>
> I have created two similar indexes, both using MyLibrary. [3] The
> older one harvested content from NSF Digital Library repositories. It
> includes about 430,000 pointers, and its content was (automatically)
> "cataloged" and enhanced. Its user interface sports spelling
> correction and some thesaurus assistance:
>
> http://mylibrary.ockham.org/
> http://www.dlib.org/dlib/october05/morgan/10morgan.html
>
> I created a much simpler interface using content from the Directory
> of Open Access Journals. This index only indexes 54,000 items, but it
> includes an authority list of publishers and sources (journals). [4]
> The primary purpose of this implementation is to demonstrate the
> possibilities of MyLibrary. It is not a production service:
>
> http://dewey.library.nd.edu/mylibrary/demos/article-index/
>
> It is not a very large leap to add the metadata describing the
> articles into a library "catalog". Authors. Journal title. Article
> title. Notes. Location (URL). Subject headings. Why not?
>
> People don't care what format information is in (as long as it is not
> microfiche), and information silos are not the way to go. Silos are
> frustrating. One for (primarily) books. Many for articles. One
> representing institutional repository content. One for archives. One
> for special collections. One for Internet resources. Etc. Metasearch
> is not going to cut it. It is a nice try, but it is not able to
> fulfill its promise since relationships between content in its
> disparate resources is not strong. Different vocabularies. Different
> fields. Different ranking and sorting algorithms. First name last.
> Last name first. On and on.
>
> Bringing all content together, as much as possible, into a single
> index, will make everybody's life a lot easier. If this is to be
> done, then the definition of the "catalog" needs to be broadened, and
> a wider number of people need to be brought into the discussion, such
> as collection managers and bibliographers. What is the scope of a
> library "catalog"? To what degree is it an inventory list, and to
> what degree is it a list of content designed to meet the needs of its
> clientele combined with sets of services applied against that content?
>
>
> Notes
>
> [1] Yes, I know. Library catalogs do contain information describing
> things other than books, but you know as well as I do that the world
> of information has grown to well beyond codexes to include mailing
> lists, data sets, computer programs, images, sounds, spreadsheets,
> PDF documents, etc. Yet still, library catalogs primarily include
> descriptions of books.
>
> [2] This also an example of how we created information "silos" in our
> libraries. Lorcan Demsey describes this predicament in greater detail
> in one of his blog postings. See: http://orweblog.oclc.org/archives/
> 001379.html
>
> [3] http://mylibrary.library.nd.edu or http://dewey.library.nd.edu/
> mylibrary/
>
> [4] No, it does not include a name authority list, but it could. I
> just didn't implement that part.
>
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> Univesity Libraries of Notre Dame
>
>
--
-----------------------------------
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 Wed Aug 22 2007 - 12:07:20 EDT