On 09/11/2012 12:23, Dave Caroline wrote:
<snip>
> If the professionals did catalogue the subjects (contents and the author names)
> perhaps I would moan less, but I came across another couple of cases recently.
>
> I got a box of cheap books at an auction, one rough book I looked
> through has an excellent discussion on a famous colliery disaster.
>
> A google search of
> "investigation into the causes of fracture in the Hartley Colliery pit
> engine beam"
> finds archive.org's uncorrected scan of the contents page in a version
> of the book and a lot of secondary sources.
> Using the British Library's search does not find it although they have the book.
> widening the search to "Hartley colliery" is better but is mostly
> poems and sermons.
>
> If you wish to research into the demolition of the ship Mauritania
> 1906-1938 after some investigation you find references to a talk
> "Demolition of the Mauretania M. Wilkinson".
> A search for that finds a few spurious and my site (not professional I
> catalogued the subjects!) and Worldcat which points at the copy in the
> National Maritime Museum which seems to the the paper on its own.
> mine is bound in an annual volume "Manchester Association of Engineers
> transactions 1939-1940".
> So why did the copy in National Maritime Museum not come top of the
> google list, answers on a postcard to the National Maritime Museum :)
</snip>
I am trying to figure out your questions. I assume that "investigation
into the causes of fracture in the Hartley Colliery pit engine beam" is
the title of the book you are interested in. When you search this title
in Google, you get the link into the text file in the Internet Archive
http://www.archive.org/stream/engineeringfact01browgoog/engineeringfact01browgoog_djvu.txt
However, at the top is a link "See other formats" and you can see the
page images. Going into the book itself based on the table of contents
for the title you gave, p. 79 (pdf p. 109)
http://archive.org/stream/engineeringfact01browgoog#page/n109/mode/1up
does not bring me to a separately titled section and I am puzzled at
this point. The title of the book is "Engineering facts and figures for
1863". It is difficult to leaf through this online and may have more
than one year bound together. This may contain your book or not. If you
search Worldcat for "Engineering facts and figures" you get a number of
hits for the serial
http://www.worldcat.org/search?q=%22engineering+facts+and+figures%22&qt=results_page
When you mention "Demolition of the Mauretania" by Wilkinson, in the
Maritime museum catalog I discover that it is a pamphlet of 32 pages and
published in 1940.
http://librarycatalogue.rmg.co.uk/uhtbin/cgisirsi/OQuWI83EmI/0/324340011/8/62537/The+demolition+of+the+Mauretania.
There are no subject headings on the record. When you search the serial
"Manchester Association of Engineers transactions" in Worldcat, you
again get a number of hits
http://www.worldcat.org/search?qt=worldcat_org_all&q=Manchester+Association+of+Engineers+transactions.
For the moment I will assume that the copy in the Maritime museum is an
offprint of this journal. So there seems to be a number of copies available.
Apparently the reason that your items do not come up more readily in
Worldcat is that a library catalog is normally focused on complete
pieces and not on articles, especially with journals. So, with the
examples above, these seem to be separate articles taken from the
journals, and therefore normally not cataloged separately, except for
the occasional offprint as we see at the Maritime museum. For individual
articles, the searcher is expected to go to separate indexes. In those
cases, when you find an article you want, you must then look up the
title of the serial in the catalog where the journal article is held. In
modern terms, you look up these things in Google Scholar or Microsoft
Academic Search, and if your browser is configured correctly, you can
automatically search the journal in your own catalog. The items you
mention are probably too old to be in those databases but there are
newer articles on those topics.
Concerning why something does or does not come up number 1 in Google is
always a mystery and a deeply-held secret. Another secret, but it should
not be, is a special way of searching Google that is fabulous: the
qualifier "intext:". Searching your book that way looks very useful
https://www.google.com/search?q=intext%3A%22demolition+of+the+mauretania%22+intext%3Awilkinson.
If you look at the Google Books metadata page
http://books.google.it/books/about/The_Demolition_of_the_Mauretania.html?id=UyznSAAACAAJ,
and you scroll to the bottom, you will find the bibliographic record,
probably loaded through Worldcat.
So in a way, it did come to the top. By the way, if you want to search
for the Mauretania in a library catalog that uses the Library of
Congress authorized forms, the heading is "Mauretania (Ship)" which
distinguishes it from "Mauretania (Kingdom)". Tough to do that in a
full-text search. But of course, if you search Worldcat for "Mauretania
(Ship)" as a subject you will *not* get the copy at the Maritime museum
because it has no subject headings, just like the example of Brazil in
the Smithsonian Flickr collection. For the colliery disaster, I have
found "Coal mine accidents" and/or "Mine explosions" both subdivided by
place, e.g. Coal mine accidents --England --Hartley.
--
*James Weinheimer* weinheimer.jim.l_at_gmail.com
*First Thus* http://catalogingmatters.blogspot.com/
*Cooperative Cataloging Rules*
http://sites.google.com/site/opencatalogingrules/
*Cataloging Matters Podcasts*
http://blog.jweinheimer.net/p/cataloging-matters-podcasts.html
Received on Fri Nov 09 2012 - 17:05:49 EST