Ed Jones wrote:
> 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".
Unfortunately, we still do cataloging that is essentially based on those
rules. And cataloging creates the catalog. That we *should* do
differently is obvious. But we don't, which is why the catalog still
serves that limited set of functions that Cutter enumerated.
kc
> 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
------------------------------------
Received on Thu May 07 2009 - 14:42:48 EDT