At 09:41 AM 2/11/2009, Ross wrote:
>After all, in my home town we have a very large used book store. It
>has no publicly accessible inventory of their 'collection', and yet it
>is always crowded with people that seem to have found what they want.
But in your bookstore example, the fact that (say) the travel books
are all together can only occur as a result of one kind of work that
catalogers do. It's not really a "knack" of the users. This
classification and collocation may be crude in a bookstore or highly
refined in an academic library. Even if a user chose never to
interact with the OPAC but only to meander through the stacks,
browsing, his finding pretty much anything would be impacted by the
work of catalogers.
I also question whether those used book store shoppers have really
"found what they want" - in truth, they want what they have found.
Quite different. Shopping brings in so many other red herrings too -
if a bookstore sells no books, is it because it has stocked the
"wrong" books? Is it because the "wrong" customers decided to visit?
Is it because of poor organization? Is it because the prices are too
high? Is it the unfriendly employees? Is it location, location,
location? Is it the economy, stupid? These seem somewhat silly but
the reasons for a bookstore's success are just as capricious. And let
us please not forget that libraries aren't bookstores.
The other things to be considered in this discussion are how
efficiently the user found materials, how the user became aware of
those materials' place in a larger system, and how the user was able
to discover other materials that might be relevant, including gaining
a knowledge and appreciation of the entire body of materials on the
particular subject being researched (some of which may not even be
held by the library in question - LCC and LCSH help to do this).
Recommended reading: <http://home.uchicago.edu/~aabbott/Papers/crl.pdf>
Mike
www.crj-online.org
www.jazzdiscography.com
Received on Wed Feb 11 2009 - 10:20:40 EST