Dear librarian friends

[dsrtao]

Because I have so many of you, and what are you for if not to abuse shamelessly with question about libraries?

When I use my library's online catalog, which I do at a frequency ranging between daily and hourly, I am presented with four search methods: keywords, authors, subjects, and titles. I nearly always use authors or titles, and I am generally happy with the results. I understand keyword searching.

Why does the concept of a subject search still exist? It can't help but present you with useless statistics, such as "there are 14,577 books in the library about the Civil War" followed by the first twenty books written by Arthur Aardvark about that subject. If it led to some sort of taxonomy or shelving system it might at least be excusable for helping the novice librarian point a patron to the right part of the building... but it doesn't.

Shouldn't this be replaced by DMOZ or the original Yahoo! directory or something similar? What am I failing to get?

Comments

MVHO

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

AFAICT, the main use for Subject Headers is for the very determined to find "more like this." So you found this book in the catalog by Smith, on the Civil War, and it has an unusual subject header, I dunno, Civil War (U.S.) - Horses. Now you can look up other books with the matching subject header, including ones that unhelpfully were named "Famous Virginians of the Civil War" but include a chapter on some famous horse.
[example search probably does not exist]

Now, if the cataloging software has made most nouns in the subject headings into keywords, then there's not any point.

Re: MVHO

[dsrtao]

OK, so it's a relic from before modern computing, when indexing was expensive. Thanks.

Re: MVHO

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

hey, if I read comments first, I could skip my morning rant. ;)