Suggestions for Possible Future Changes to our On-Line Catalog

New Directions Initiative

I didn't go to Betsy Wilson's talk, so these are some general suggestions for possible future changes to our on-line catalog. Comments about books could also apply to all other media for which we keep records in the catalog.

Our on-line library catalog might be more useful to students, faculty members and the general public if it included the following:

Reviews of each book, with 1 to 5 stars ratings, with a link in each book's record to a ratings form. See Amazon.com for examples.
Links to full text of books that have full text in any on-line database. E.g., Baen Free Library, Bartleby.com, Focus Collection, Oxford World's Classics, Questia, etc.
Links to web sites that can translate foreign language text into English provided they can interact with other web sites to translate the texts of books on those web sites.
Subject approach as one available option. For example, if I want a book on how to repair my house, I want to be able to find it under "House repair" and under "Home repair," with further break-downs by type of repair and part of the house.
Author and/or title approach also, in case the catalog user already knows that John Doe wrote a great book on how to repair screen doors.
Key word search of titles and contents notes as another way the user can find the most useful books. The more ways people can find information, the better.

Submitted by Camille Holser

Oct 19, 2007 | Categories: Topics We're Discussing | guest

2 comments »

2 comments

Comment from: Jennifer Dorner [Visitor]

I believe all of these features would greatly enhance the Library's catalog. The best enhancement, however, would be to have complete and accurate cataloging records for every item in our Library.

11/04/07 @ 14:05

Comment from: jkupersm [Member]

All these are worthy features. IMHO, links to the full text of books are especially important. Another feature on my personal wish list is "people who checked out this book also checked out these books" - it works great on Amazon.com, why not for us?

Some of the features mentioned in this post are already here, in more or less developed form.

re "Subject approach as one available option":
Pathfinder and Melvyl both offer searching and browsing on subject headings, though not on natural language variants. In this example, "home repair" works but "house repair" doesn't. That's one reason why these systems generally default to title keyword.

re "Author and/or title approach":
Good news on this one! Pathfinder's Advanced search defaults to an author/title combination. Melvyl's Advanced search defaults to title/title, but this can be changed to author/title.

re "Key word search of titles and contents notes":
More good news! Pathfinder offers a Notes/Table of Contents search; while not all items are indexed this way, it can often pull up results that Title Keyword misses. Melvyl does even better, with a Keywords search that includes "words in title, subject, ... publisher information, table of contents, conference headings, added titles, uniform titles, and year".

01/12/08 @ 11:31

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