Thanks, Jean, for reminding me of the horrible (in my mind) situation
for music searching here. Our online catalog has chosen not to display
uniform titles for a browse search by author (composer), and this been
the situation for a number of years. The list *displays* in uniform
title order, but I don't know what good that does anybody when you can't
see them. It appears that the records display in no rational order at
all, since all you see is the 245 on the browse screen. I have
complained as vociferously as I know how to our techies, to no avail.
I'm the music cataloger, but do not work in the music library, so I
don't know if their users like the situation or not. The music librarian
has not mentioned it. I guess they like the googlization. I hear
"scoping" might be coming our way, so maybe that will help when users
search using that.
Jack Hall
Manager of Cataloging Services
Linguistics Librarian
University of Houston Libraries
Houston, TX 77204-2000
phone: 713 743 9687
fax: 713 743 9748
email: jhall_at_uh.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Harden, Jean
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2009 9:58 AM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: Tim Berners-Lee on the Semantic Web. Alternatives.
...
A while back at one upgrade of our online catalog, our Web catalog
temporarily lost display of uniform titles (precisely what gives the
expression and work information, collocated, as things stand currently).
Faculty complained loudly that they couldn't find anything. Students
also couldn't find anything, as evidenced by greatly increased traffic
at our music reference desk, though they didn't complain so loudly. We
catalogers complained to the techies, who restored the display of
uniform titles. All of a sudden, people could find things again.
Received on Thu Oct 22 2009 - 11:26:34 EDT