At 10:11 PM 5/6/2009, Ross Singer wrote:
>Not to mention that your local catalog is but a speck of a subset of
>the resources in Amazon/GBS/Google Scholar/etc.
I entirely agree that often one wants to expand beyond one's own
local collection, but sorry, I can't go along with this idea. What
Amazon has is the speck of the subset when your set is the totality
of books published over the course of centuries (i.e., what research
libraries collect and catalog). If you're interested in books that
aren't currently or recently in print or that are in any way obscure,
you've got to use WorldCat or the LC catalog or something else like a
national library catalog. And Google Book Search, for all it has
added, still isn't there yet - not by a long shot. If you are
searching for common, current materials, then fine - wade through
Amazon. But research often takes one out of the common and current
and into the obscure.
The other thing to consider is that the library catalog - and only
the library catalog at this point - offers even the possibility of
accurately identifying collocated resources. Amazon simply cannot do
it (and neither can Google Book Search). The hyperlinking of
authorized forms of names, at the least, is vital as a discovery
tool. Subjects would be next, and there's plenty of room for
improvement in catalogs, but Amazon and Google Book Search are just
disasters in this area. Now, name-title hyperlinks in the catalog
would be paradise, but that's a subject for another day....
Mike
www.crj-online.org
www.jazzdiscography.com
Received on Wed May 06 2009 - 22:54:58 EDT