I know this is asking for trouble, but I can't resist sharing my latest
Google adventure with you all. My husband and I were feeding stale bread to
some coots on Echo Park Lake (in a neighborhood park near our house), when I
was suddenly conscience-stricken at the realization that I didn't actually
know if stale bread was good for coots. When I got home, I typed in to
Google's famous search box "what do coots eat?" The reply that came back
was a web site entitled "What do eagles eat?" In the list of eagle edibles
was coots.
In LCSH, the heading Coots--Food would give you perfect recall and precision
for monographs wholly about what coots eat, if there were any. If this
society placed a high value on universal employment (which it clearly
doesn't), the heading Coots-Food would also bring up journal articles and
papers that were wholly about what coots eat. We could even imagine a
future in which correct RDF coding might allow a computer to translate the
heading for a user who couldn't understand LCSH-ese into "food that coots
eat."
Just saying...
Martha
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Martha M. Yee
Cataloging Supervisor
UCLA Film & Television Archive
1015 N. Cahuenga Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90038-2616
323-462-4921 x27
323-469-9055 (fax)
myee_at_ucla.edu (Email at work)
Campus mail:
302 E. Melnitz
132306
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"You have a dollar. I have a dollar. We swap. Now you have my dollar and I
have your dollar. We are not better off. You have an idea. I have an idea.
We swap. Now you have two ideas and I have two ideas. Both are richer. When
you gave, you have. What I got, you did not lose. That’s cooperation"—Jimmy
Durante quoted in Schnozzola, by Gene Fowler, 1951, p. 207-208.
Received on Tue Jan 29 2008 - 11:11:58 EST