I fail to still get your point. If it's hard no matter what, all approac
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 2:53 PM, Patrick Cates <Cates_at_gts.edu> wrote:
> Re: Sabin: the point is there is no simple search to find it. It's
> there on GBS, but good luck finding it because GBS doesn't link volumes
> in a set or even indicate volume #s on the results pages. A library
> catalog treats sets as sets. If I can find the record for Sabin, I can
> find all the volumes. If I search the keywords Sabin Bibliotheca
> Americana in a library catalog, if it's owned, I'll find it and I can
> get any volume I need off the shelf. In GBS, those keywords give you
> 1751 results, the irrelevant ones begin with the fifth result, and you
> have to click on each of the relevant ones to see if it is what you
> want. Again, the point is sometimes it is not easier to search GBS etc.
> than a library catalog.
But your quote was "you would find it a lot easier to look
up Sabin or Parsons in a library catalog and go to the shelves and look
at them." in your original email. That's what lead me down this path.
I figured since you picked two examples that you were actually going
off of searches where various online sources had failed you.
Since these seem to be relatively rare books, you don't get anything
from your catalog if you go to look at them since they likely will not
be there. And they won't be in the catalog, which is Ross' point.
For your first example a google search took me to
http://www2.lib.udel.edu/subj/engl/resguide/natbib.htm which has some
of the microfilm collections that contain this series. Something that
I didn't seem to get to via the catalog, most likely because of
incomplete table of contents. In this case, I still say Google wins
out. It got me more pointers to possible sources of the information
than the catalog.
>
> My other point was that even if you find the book (Parsons), if you
> can't get the stuff in it, it's worthless.
Ummm, still don't get your point. Online resources have additional
metadata, related articles, and sometimes even scholarly works. Yes,
sometimes there are books where there's just not much information on
in any resource.....how can that be used in comparison for various
resources about material?
Using the search within a book feature of the reprint though (which
was part of my point) I can hazard a guess to the answer, which is
no. http://books.google.com/books?id=IfFGAAAAMAAJ&q=Early+Catholic+Americana&dq=Early+Catholic+Americana&ei=KT8DSrXJDqG2zQToxNn5Cg&pgis=1.
Just think, if that reprint had been a decade and a half earlier, I'd
be able to answer your question even more definitively.
> And the title is in Parsons,
> BTW.
Thanks for the correction, but it was a typo. I did several
variations of the title in my search. But if we're going to be
needlessly pedantic, I will say from the various records give me the
impression the title of the book is Early Catholic Americana, not
"Parsons Early Catholic Americana". That might be wrong, but I
would suspect it is really more of a gray area and both "titles" are
justified.
In the end I don't view this as a competition between
Google/Amazon/catalogs/print/online etc, but I get very curious as
what the advantages and disadvantages of various resources, online and
print. I'm also interested in how people search. The thread started
talking about resource discovery, so I'm hard pressed to see how your
examples demonstrate advantages of any system of resource discovery.
To use rare and hard to find books you already have to be an expert
and hence need less of a system of resource discovery. I certainly
don't see how most library catalogs would be any better at this. Your
point about sets is a good one, but I frequently find that the series
information in records in a catalog are still pretty bad. I wish they
were like how they could be, but they are not. In the end I much
prefer sources like LibraryThing for modern series since they're
usually more accurate. Indeed, series has long been a bit of a
frustration for me because depending on where or how they're cataloged
they seem incomplete. For older titles I prefer hunting down
bibliographies if possible.
I'd love to see our catalogs more tightly integrated for
bibliographies for precisely this reason. And other possible
resources like information gleamed from LibraryThing on series or
similar resources. Find out how various resources enhance the
discovery process and harvest them to create a better central point.
It may be that to be a good searcher in the future though it is
unavoidable you'll have to search in several different resources. I
do know I'll still prefer starting online due to the sheer economics
of it.
Jon Gorman
bibliophile
Received on Thu May 07 2009 - 16:56:04 EDT