I can see what someone might want to demonstrate certain concepts using a card catalog, but I can't imagine it's helping today's students very much.
The sad thing is that the card catalog performed certain functions (e.g., giving people a sense of where they're at in the big picture, providing a sensible organization and display of many types of materials) than current OPACs do. IMHO, there are several reasons for this.
1. Our data is still designed for printing cards, rather than providing machine-manipulable data for today's environment. The MARC format, despite some visionary elements, was designed for the practical task of printing cards. Our data is overly focused on text strings and not designed for easy extraction and manipulation of parts of the record. We retain practices that were designed to save space on cards. A lot of things don't work well in the OPAC because they were designed to produce data to be interpreted and filed by a human being. We need to modernize what data we record and how we record it. As it is, the form of the date often is an obstacle to developing the systems we need.
2. On the other hand, designers of OPACs seem to often fail to understand the purpose of the data and thus implement interfaces that are at cross purposes with what the data is trying to do. An obvious example is the failure of most OPACs to display materials that are available in many versions and are usually meant to be collocated by uniform titles (e.g., classical Western music) in any way that would help someone browse or make it easy for them to know what the library actually has.
Sometimes, it seems like OPAC designers don't take the time to understand how something works, even when it actually is relatively straightforward and meant to work in a computer-based environment. One of my pet peeves with our catalog (SirsiDynix Symphony) is that it has a completely dysfunctional language limiter. This is based on the language 008 fixed field and the 041 field, which contains additional languages other than the main one in the 008. This is coded data. SirsiDynix offers only under-retrieval (008 only, which misses any bilingual materials or alternate soundtracks or subtitle tracks on DVDs) or over-retrieval (008 + the entire 041, including $h, which is for the original or intermediate translation language and makes to sense mushed in with the limiter for languages that items are actually useful in). We have the over-retrieval setting, which is okay usually for DVDs, but is a disaster for people who want to read things in the original, say French, since thei!
r desired materials are buried in the more voluminous materials in our collection that have been translated from French.
I wonder how they can't get what seems such a simple point (and I can see how this could be a real deal breaker for a library like Queens that has a significant multilingual collection). I sometimes think (though I have no way of knowing) that the must have made some rigid, low-level decisions a long time ago that make this hard to fix than it seems like it should be. I suspect all OPACs have odd little quirks like this.
Sorry for the rant, but in the last month, I have had to remind two of reference librarians of the compensatory strategy (still misses bilingual stuff) involving Boolean operators and curly brackets. And how many patrons never ask for every one who does?
I agree that it is depressing how much we are still trying to imitate the card catalog when we are not constrained by those limitation anymore. It is even more depressing that we have not managed to find new and more flexible ways to port all of the card catalog's functionality to the online environment.
Kelley McGrath
kmcgrath_at_bsu.edu
--------------------
B.G. Sloan wrote...
"At Univ. of South Carolina, the Card Catalog's Graceful Departure",
Library Journal, October 29, 2009.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6704296.html
I'm not exactly sure about this snippet:
"One section of the card catalog will remain in TCL as an artifact.
Birchfield noted that librarians who teach LIBR 100, a one-credit
information literacy course, usually pull a card catalog drawer to
show students some of the organizing principles."
Imagine you're a student in LIBR 100, and a librarian pulls out a
paper file that hasn't been updated since 1991 to teach you how to use
a computer system. :-)
I think it speaks volumes for how today's online catalogs are still
tied to the old paper catalog model.
Bernie Sloan
Received on Mon Nov 02 2009 - 12:04:03 EST