Re: Searching

I'm as much an admirer of Cutter as the next person, but his rules were
designed for a particular context with particular constraints: a printed
alphabetical catalog (in book form), providing limited access to the
content of what we would today call "containers".  It's no accident that
Cutter included a synopsis of his rules in the printed Boston Athenaeum
catalog: He knew that while they were logical and consistent--as they
had to be to achieve his purposes--they weren't intuitive, even for the
nineteenth century.  Cutter devised an excellent system for providing
access to content locked up in containers in a time when the library
catalog was the only available means to that end, and the only question
was what the optimal structure for that catalog might be.  To me, Cutter
hit on the answer for that place and time, and the Boston Athenaeum
catalog represents the pinnacle of the cataloger's art.  But that world
is gone.  The containers are exploding.  We've got to shift from seeing
the catalog as central to discovery to seeing it as ancillary, serving a
supporting role among a much larger cast.  

-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 7:29 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Searching

B.G. Sloan wrote:
>  
> I've noticed this when talking with grad students and faculty. They
don't use the catalog as a resource discovery tool. They tend to use the
catalog to check the availabilty of an already known item: Does the
library own it? If so, is it on the shelf? Heck, I do it myself, and my
job used to entail working with online catalogs.
>   

This is *exactly* what library cataloging and catalogs have been 
designed to do. Go back and read Cutter, and the role of cataloguing is:

1. to enable a person to find a book of which either
 a. the author
 b. the title
 c. the subject
        is known.
2. to show what the library has
 d. by a given author
 e. on a given subject
 f. in a given kind of literature
3. to assist in the choice of a book
 g. as to its edition
 h. as to its character (literary or topical)

It's all about *what the library has*. And I love #1, where author, 
title or subject is "known" to the user. FRBR doesn't go beyond this in 
its user tasks: 'find' is 'find in this catalog'. And WorldCat? That's 
the same thing over a large group of catalogs. If your catalog is large 
enough it serves as a substitute for a bibliography (you assume it has 
every book the author wrote), but that's a side-effect of the size, not 
an actual purpose of the catalog.

kc

>  
> Granted, I'm not talking about a representative sample of catalog
users, but it is pretty common for people I know (some who are quite
familiar with how to use online catalogs) to use other tools for
resource discovery and use the catalog just to check availability.
>  
> Bernie Sloan
> SORA Associates
> Bloomington, IN
>
> --- On Wed, 5/6/09, Ed Jones <ejones_at_NU.EDU> wrote:
>
> From: Ed Jones <ejones_at_NU.EDU>
> Subject: [NGC4LIB] Searching
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Date: Wednesday, May 6, 2009, 5:37 PM
>
> I'm going to make a confession here.  Typically when I'm looking for a
> library book for my own use, I will search for it (via Google) in
> Amazon.com or Google Book Search. Then when I find it--which I almost
> invariably do--I click on its ISBN, an action which automatically
> triggers a search (via LibX and xISBN) in the local National
University
> Library catalog for that edition and any closely related editions.
> While this strategy doesn't work for older in-copyright books (or the
> dwindling number of contemporary books published without ISBNs), it
> works in an overwhelming number of cases.  So much so that it's become
> my default search strategy.
>
> Ed Jones
> National University (San Diego, Calif.)
>
>
>
>       
>
>
>   


-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596   skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
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