Wait a second! There are absolutely no books in the LC or in WorldCat with
the subject Coots--Food! Indeed there are only two books tagged "Coots" at
all.*
Miraculously, one of those books is about what coots eat: _Food habits of
the American coot with notes on distribution_ by John C. Jones (1940). It
has the subjects:
Coots
Birds--Food
Which I think nicely illustrates one problem with LCSH. Coots are birds, so
by logic Coots--Food would also apply. But that's not logic you can encode
easily.
So, we can choose between trying another Google search—' "coots eat" ' works
better—and getting the answer right away or putting in an ILL to get a 1940s
monograph about coots which is probably none-too concerned with what regular
people do or don't try to feed them.
If you're going to compare actual Google results, you should compare it with
actual subject results. And if you're going to use the "we can imagine a
future" test, you should try imagining what *Google* will do too.
Tim
*Compared with 16 for "Cootie catchers" and another 17 for "Cootie catchers"
with a period at the end.
On 1/29/08, Martha Yee <myee_at_ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> 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
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>
> 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
>
> %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
>
>
> "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.
>
--
Check out my library at http://www.librarything.com/profile/timspalding
Received on Tue Jan 29 2008 - 11:44:11 EST