This discussion of browse vs. keyword has been valuable to me in thinking of
a response to a question I received a while ago from a faculty member.  He
wanted to use the online catalog to find books by Petrarch, so he did an
author keyword search for "Petrarch".  Seems like a reasonable approach.
But he didn't know that the authorized form of Petrarch's name is Francesco
Petrarca (why would he?).  So in his author keyword search he only got a
couple of items by the Petrarch Society, etc., with no indication of what he
did wrong.

Has anyone come up with a way for cross-references on authority records to
be useful in a keyword search?  What would be really, useful, I suppose, is
for the system to recognize that Petrarch was a 400 on the authority record
for Petrarca, and say on the results screen "Did you mean Petrarca,
Francesco, 1304-1374?"  But is that still a pipe dream for now?  Is user
education the only answer here?

Patricia

Patricia M. Dragon
Cataloging Department
Joyner Library
East Carolina University
Greenville, NC  27858-4353
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(252) 328-0296

-----Original Message-----
From: Bernhard Eversberg [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 9:32 AM
Subject: Re: Building catalogues


On 24 Mar 04, at 8:48, J. McRee Elrod wrote:

>
> The advantage of OPACs over card catalogues is that we can add to the
> above Boolean searching and keyword searching.  But all the above is
> needed to match what we had in the card catalogue.  Not all OPACs have
> even that.  Too often we are told by some OPACs "no matches to your
> search term" or some such.
>
The card catalog, indeed, always shows a meaningful context that faces the
user with what is there and what, implicitly, is not there. Correct spelling
of long headings, for example, thus becomes much less of a problem. OPACs
can do much better in that they may show various different, rich indexes
instead of only one card sequence that contains a very few cards per book.
But many OPACs show no index at all, they just respond with "no matches" or
somesuch. Designers should be made aware that their product is inferior to
cards in that regard. The importance of browsing needs to be pointed out to
them.

B.E.



Bernhard Eversberg
Universitaetsbibliothek, Postf. 3329,
D-38023 Braunschweig, Germany
Tel.  +49 531 391-5026 , -5011 , FAX  -5836
e-mail  [log in to unmask]