Bernhard Eversberg wrote: > We might first have to say why library catalogs are still a better > solution to many problems of searching, before we begin advocating their > improvement via RDA and FRBR. > > Here's an attempt: > > http://www.allegro-c.de/formate/wlc.htm > > trying to say things in plain language and backing it up with > appropriate examples taken directly from WorldCat and GB.
Unfortunately, starting from this basic point is probably necessary, especially in view of the report mentioned on the ACRL Blog at: http://acrlog.org/2008/11/06/no-wonder-students-think-its-a-waste-of-time/ This mentions a report from Educause that says that students think they already know how to search already. This agrees with my own experience, except that I have seen that everybody thinks they know how to search the web. (Naturally, this is a generalization, but I think it holds true) It has also been well-known for a long, long time among reference librarians that lots of people couldn't find things in the card catalogs either. Two suggestions on your page: 1) if this is for the general public, I would change jargon such as "access points." 2) I personally have found it very difficult to find known-items in Google Book Search, and it's for this reason. A lot of the materials I look for are older, and when I search for exact title and author(s) I still gets hundreds of hits. I couldn't figure out why until I discovered the reason: I am getting all of the advertisements in the backs of the books as well! So weird! So, if they are older materials, I've discovered that if they are from a special library collection, I can add the words of the special collection in my search and the hits narrow down. One of my topics is chess, and I can search e.g. "Silas Howland" and get books only from the Harvard special chess collection. It's amazing that as these things get "easier" they get "harder" as well, and that specialized knowledge still comes in handy. Jim Weinheimer
