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

Vestigal remains of a bygone era

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

From what I understand library search was invented before usability. (insert usual private rant here) So it's based on "What fields do we have?" rather than "What info are people looking for?" When hashing the table was expensive and time-consuming, writing down human-inferred things like "Subject" was very good; now that generating the table is essentially free and sorting it really is free (in comparison to rearranging 100,000 cards, which I've done...) it makes very little sense.

A related rant is how citations are laid out. Who the hell cares which city the publisher is in in the age of the Internet? Meanwhile, you have to fight through a tangle of info to discover the bits you actually need.

Re: Vestigal remains of a bygone era

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Oh, I remember taking Cataloging in grad school. Painstaking, fussy, and you always wondered whether the user was going to be able to get what he needed.

Subject in an on line library catalog is almost always a carry-over from the old days of card catalogs.

Now that memory space is darn close to free, you can have as many subjects or keywords per volume as you want. In the Old Days, you were limited - and had to print and file a card for each.