Yes, what Google does is vastly more difficult, but the public library
catalog is dealing with a much more narrowly defined set of known
items: an index of titles and authors in our collection. And a failed
search does usually offer an index of what *is* there, but once again
the user is required to type the title or author (last name comma
space first name, please!) exactly as it is entered in the catalog or
else the near-matches will not make any sense.
Sharon M. Foster, 91.7% Librarian
Speaker-to-Computers
http://www.vsa-software.com/mlsportfolio/
On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 9:43 AM, Bernhard Eversberg <ev_at_biblio.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> Lundgren,Jimmie Harrell wrote:
>>
>> So many times we hear that library catalogs fail in the imagined
>> popularity contest against Google or Amazon.com. We are encouraged to
>> believe that is explained by their greater comprehensiveness or superiority
>> as discovery tools.
>> Please take a moment to question those assumptions. What obvious
>> differences exist between library catalogs and those systems some would have
>> us emulate? One significant difference may lie in the outcomes of searches
>> in those tools. Searchers in Google are usually rewarded by being able to
>> get what they find immediately with a click of the mouse. Searchers in
>> Amazon.com are able to order online immediately and sit back and wait for
>> the book to arrive. Searchers in catalogs in some cases are able to get what
>> they find immediately online, but more often they have to get up out of
>> their chairs and go to a shelf somewhere and take down a book. Users, unlike
>> some librarians, may not be so obsessed with discovery but want to actually
>> get the information resource they need as easily as possible.
>
> This may be the most immediately and acutely perceived difference
> between catalogs and search engines. But there are others as well that
> shouldn't all be swept under the rug. Find a list here:
>
> http://www.allegro-c.de/formate/tlcse.htm
>
> (The section "Comparing Catalogs and Search Engines" lists a number of
> criteria and discusses them.)
>
> And Sharon M. Foster replied:
>
>> ... if the user got a "did you mean?" or a list of close matches, ...
>
> or a browsable index that clearly shows _what's there_, and that what
> the user entered is not there. The former, the "did you mean?" feature,
> is vastly more demanding to do in a halfway convincing and useful
> manner.
> It takes Google an enormous amount of processing to achieve, based on
> zillions of user inputs and clever statistical evaluation. Also, I doubt
> our scores of different systems could manage that in a way that was
> not too obviously different from one platform to the next. The text
> matter our catalogs contain, and the number of queries we process, is
> very likely much too small.
>
> B.Eversberg
>
Received on Tue Feb 17 2009 - 09:50:18 EST