Karen Coyle said: "...if your language has an alphabetical order (and not
all do), then taking words/names and placing them in that order is helpful
because users know the alphabet."
To which Bernie Sloan replied: People may know the alphabet, but that
doesn't necessarily mean they completely understand the concept of putting
things in alphabetical order. I patronize several local video rental stores,
and each of them has some real quirks when it comes to arranging the DVDs on
shelves
And I note: I am currently preparing a talk in celebration of the 50th
anniversary of the Southern California Technical Processes Librarians, and
have had occasion to look back over the past 50 years -- Including looking
back at "Rather's Rules" (Filing Rules for the Dictionary Catalogs of the
Library of Congress"), the last great code for manual catalog filing). 187
pages of filing instructions and examples. And by gum, we followed them
when we filed by hand. I believe it was Karen Coyle who mentioned a couple
of days ago that when we filed by hand, we could manage to file conceptually
as well as alphabetically. And Rather's Rules illustrate that. When we
gave up and let the machine file for us, we had to forego such
sophistication. Frankly, I don't think many (any?) people miss it, because
they didn't know what they were looking at in a card catalog, and they don't
know what they are looking at online. They are just used to things being in
some mysterious order that approximates the alphabet. (And I doubt that any
computer programmers would have thought it worthwhile to incorporate such
filing complexity into their programming) Nevertheless, it may repay a look
at what we once thought was important to encompass in how we put things into
"alphabetical" order.
Janet Swan Hill, Professor
Associate Director for Technical Services
University of Colorado Libraries, CB184
Boulder, CO 80309
janet.hill_at_colorado.edu
*****
Tradition is the handing-on of Fire, and not the worship of Ashes.
- Gustav Mahler
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of B.G. Sloan
Sent: Monday, March 16, 2009 2:16 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Browse functionality (was Whose elephant is it,
anyway? (the OLE project))
.
I'm not talking about maybe having a single DVD slightly out of alphabetical
order. For example, the titles beginning with "Sa.." to "Sl..." might be in
good order. Next come titles beginning with "Su.." to "Sw...". And then,
seemingly from out of nowhere, come titles beginning "Sm..." to "St..."
This drives me crazy, as a librarian. But it doesn't seem to bother other
customers. I've pointed this out to staff, but they sort of look at me like
I'm some sort of harmless kook. :-)
I think this harkens back a bit to my "systems deveopled BY librarians FOR
librarians" statement. Librarians know alphabetization a lot more precisely
than the general public. Alphabetization can be a lot messier out there in
the real world. We need to be careful when assuming that our library-world
views on a given topic are reflected in the real-world views of our users.
Bernie Sloan
--- On Fri, 3/13/09, Karen Coyle <lists_at_KCOYLE.NET> wrote:
> From: Karen Coyle <lists_at_KCOYLE.NET>
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Browse functionality (was Whose elephant is it,
anyway? (the OLE project))
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Friday, March 13, 2009, 12:05 PM
> Owen, yes, I think this is worth exploring. One of the
> bright lights of early librarianship (no time to dig it up,
> maybe later) talked about "known order," mainly
> referring, of course, to alphabetical order. Back to the
> phone book: if your language has an alphabetical order (and
> not all do), then taking words/names and placing them in
> that order is helpful because users know the alphabet. If
> instead you ordered the phone book by how tall people are,
> it wouldn't be very helpful because the order
> wouldn't match the user's knowledge. The other thing
> about this kind of search is that the user probably has to
> have a pretty good idea of what he's looking for -- a
> particular place in the known order, e.g. someone's last
> name. This is really a 'find' not a 'browse'
> in my mind. No one expects to go from a-z in the phone book,
> although they may wish to in a shorter list (your journal
> titles example). Funny, though, that we don't expect
> items on a restaurant menu to be in alphabetical order, yet
> we are usually able to find what we are looking for
> ("do they have a tuna sandwich"?). I think that
> *quantity* of entries is a big factor in terms of how much
> order is needed.
>
> It seems to be inherent in a thesaurus that the users are
> not expected to already know the order of the entries, but
> that the thesaurus actually guides the user. The user
> isn't doing a mere lookup, but is following a structure.
> The user possibly expects to be directed to other concepts
> from his entry term and the thesaurus must be able to guide
> the user from whatever starting point the user chooses. So
> if someone goes into the thesaurus with the term
> "sociology" the thesaurus will provide a
> conceptual context and some directions the user can go in.
> Thesauri tend to be hierarchical, but I think we could do
> ones that are not so using more relationships than just BT,
> NT, RT.
>
> Some folks have experimented with providing LC
> classification has a kind of subject browse. I don't
> know how useful that has turned out to be for users. It is
> multiple hierarchies and not perfectly hierarchical, but it
> has conceptual structure. But LCSH isn't LCC. The main
> thing is that LCSH is neither a 'known order' list
> (because users don't know the entry terms) nor is it a
> thesaurus, because it has so little conceptual structure. So
> trying this thought experiment with LCSH in mind gets one
> pretty twisted.
>
> kc
>
Received on Mon Mar 16 2009 - 17:37:36 EDT