Thanks for sharing this. Actually, I am currently at a conference in Budapest and this precise topic came up, where I confess, I spoke up.
The attitude in the conference meeting was veering toward the idea that library subjects just do not work, and I spoke up and said that, even though it really hurts me to say so, I must say that in my own work, I have seen that people do not understand how a catalog works. Even though some may try very hard to understand, they still don't. But that doesn't mean that we should stop doing subject analysis (and headings in general), it's that the way everything is structured is that we are all still making catalog cards. Everything we make can still be printed out and put into a card catalog of the 19th century, or even in a printed book catalog from the 17th century.
People browsed because they had no other choice; they couldn't even imagine one, and the tools reflected this. When you use the tools correctly, you still see the power of this method (as Nathan's anecdote illustrated, which showed how this person rediscovered the power of the card catalog). At the same time, we simply must confess that people use keyword searching first, last and always. Perhaps in pre-Google times, we could ignore all of this, but today people want to use this other service, which they like. Information literacy classes make little dent in how people search, no matter how much we tell them that they are doing it wrong, or how much we frown at what they do. Our tools must be relevant to people's uses
Nevertheless, our tools provide a type of access that Google *cannot provide* and this is what we need to focus on: not to get rid of the old ways, but to make them relevent in the new world.
I don't know the answer, but I think there are many out there.
James L. Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
Rome, Italy
Received on Wed Jun 09 2010 - 12:51:05 EDT