> Has the public wanted catalogs or bibliographies? From my research, and
> also from my experience of what patrons want, including myself, I would
> hazard a guess that in the vast majority of cases, they want
> bibliographies because very few people who are interested in the text
> and criticism of Huckleberry Finn want to see records for completely
> different topics, e.g. Arabic calligraphy or tomes on the war of the
> Spanish Succession. In a catalog, you will see these records that are
> irrelevant to your needs, especially in a keyword-type environment,
> while in a "Bibliography of the texts and criticism of Twain's
> Huckleberry Finn" you will not. In catalogs, it is almost inevitable
But this historical idea of a bibliography hand-crafted by an expert on a particular topic -- it is highly unrealistic to think that such a bibliography can be created for every possible topic a user may be interested in.
In the 21st century (heck, even in the 20th century), the point of the field of 'information retrieval', building systems to answer user queries, is trying to make a system that can start from a large corpus, and assemble what we could call a 'bibliography', a subset of that corpus matching the user's query. Matching on full text if we have it, matching on controlled vocabulary if we have it, etc.
Of course, this assembled subset is not going to be as good as a human expert created bibliography. It's really disrespectful to call it a 'bibliography' at all, except by analogy.
But the idea that there will be human expert maintained bibliographies created and kept up to date for every possible research topic a user may be interested in -- is simply a weird luddite fantasy.
Jonathan
Received on Thu Aug 11 2011 - 17:53:12 EDT