Comments on: budget cuts for staff = books lost forever

By: Ananke

Ananke — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 02:57:18 +0000

I think the ‘Na’ issue is a problem when you use common words. Because if you search for Hamlet and it isn’t under H, most of the time you don’t scroll down to T just in case. Particularly a problem if you rank the results in alphabetical and seperate pages (like most databases do with periodical titles) because it isn’t at all intuitive.

Searching for stuff when you know it’s there is not the best way to test the useability of a search, particularly the way the results are presented.

By: Kevin Driedger

Kevin Driedger — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 19:07:44 +0000

Okay, I read the article and while I do agree that poor cataloging leads to lost books, I don’t think the information in the article is accurate, or maybe it isn’t current, or maybe the author is a lousy catalog searcher. A keyword search of a library catalog will pick up a title whether the initial article is present or not. So, even if the Harvard library’s catalog records incorrectly indexed “na” as the first word of many titles, a keyword search for the subsequent words would still get the title. It wouldn’t work for a title browse search, but lets face it, most people do keyword searches, or if their title browse search doesn’t work, they move to a keyword search.

I just tested this out at the Harvard library catalog and titles that began “na” search just fine as keywords. So, yes, good cataloging is a good thing, but no, things are not as bad as this author reports (at least in this instance).

By: mariser

mariser — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:10:36 +0000

yes, I thought this was terribly sad. and a cautionary tale; this story is “the smoking gun” that needs to be brought out any time an administrator/whoever argues that “there is no need for a cataloger…anybody can do that copy-and-paste…” copy-cataloging should not be an excuse to not verify records

/rant

By: david king

david king — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 14:07:57 +0000

Of course, a better keyword/relevenace ranked search and RFID would REALLY help alleviate this problem…

Just sayin.