James said:
<snip>
I was discussing the world-view of catalogers, who must look at the world beyond their local collections.
</snip>
That is an incredible disingenous statement, Mr. Weinheimer. Who exactly are your catalogers? Most of the catalogers I know look way beyond their local collections. My cataloging students certainly do not escape my classes without having that wide worldview seared into their brains. (Perhaps it is the administrators who are short-sighted and don't provide the resources to make this happen.)
<snip>
I firmly believe that a catalog should give access to materials in my collection. But, I also believe that an electronic book in the Internet Archive is just as much a part of my collection as some physical one on my shelves. My users want them; I want them. But not just books, there are a wondrous amount of resources out there: educational videos, interactive scholarly sites, and so on.
</snip>
But here is where I don't understand you---many library catalogs do these things already. Many academic library catalogs and public libraries allow users to search the local catalog and also a whole bevy of Electronic resources. Here at UNT we use a Federated Search Engine to search all of the journal databases at once, if so desired.
<snip>
I don't think they liked it one bit.
<snip>
Omigod, I'm gonna cry.
I love having to dig up things in the library, especially things the old print Citation Indexes. Fascinating stuff. Therefore, I think people do like it.
Seriously, we need some hard evidence of this --again, too much generalization across the board on what we think people like or don't like. I agree with Mr. Eversberg--case studies of actual query pursuits.
<snip>
When the journals first came out, librarians tried to catalog each article, just like a book, but it soon became impossible to even imagine doing so, and therefore, they outsourced it ...
<snip>
This issue has been around for years....Ranganathan numbers each section in his chapters because he wanted his works to be accessible on that level. If all information resources in the world were completely digital I could see this happening. But, the REALITY is that they are not. And they will not be for a long time. Google can throw all the money they want at it. It's not going to help.
<snip>
I made the following record: http://www.galileo.aur.it/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=22971 where the 856 field uses a Google query. So, I cataloged it as a type of collection. Quick and dirty, I admit, but otherwise, the materials in Google can't be found.
</snip>
Very clever. I will bring this up in class.
**************************************************************
Shawne D. Miksa, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Department of Library and Information Sciences
College of Information
University of North Texas
email: Shawne.Miksa_at_unt.edu
http://courses.unt.edu/smiksa/index.htm
office 940-565-3560 fax 940-565-3101
**************************************************************
Received on Wed Oct 28 2009 - 17:58:24 EDT