19.11.2012 17:03, James Weinheimer:
>
> If you look up "Hamburger" in the LC Authority file, and look hard, you
> will get a Broader Term reference to "Sandwiches" from there to
> "Cooking" from there to "Home economics" from there to "Family life
> education" etc. This is a classified arrangement that exists now, and
> has always been. It's just that the classified arrangement was always
> more difficult to use, first, because Cutter et al. decided to focus on
> alphabetical order with their dictionary catalog.
They didn't really have a choice here because the first objective
was that books be findable by their author and title.
(When talking about "discovery", we almost always mean subject access,
but "formal" (rule-based) access by names and titles remains a
necessity for library catalogs, and it remains important that it be
efficient and reliable.)
> But they understood
> what they were losing and wanted to retain the possibility of classified
> retrieval. That is the importance of the syndetic structure of the
> authority file. The cards weren't arranged in classified order, but in
> dictionary order but the classified arrangement could still be
> followed--with trouble.
>
Classified access, to work well, needs a good classification, and
then to to be kept current. With new subjects cropping up all the time,
this was never possible and may not be even today.
In addition, it was never quite possible to classify all titles,
but all got an author-title unit card.
Together, these restrictions make a classified catalog less reliable.
Nonetheless, some countries, Germany among them, have had a long
tradition of classified catalogs. They were maintained seperate from
the alphabetical main catalog, of course, since the ordering was
by number. Some have integrated classified access into their opacs.
B.Eversberg
Received on Tue Nov 20 2012 - 03:32:53 EST