catalog

Search The Sears And Roebuck Catalog

You’d think the Sears Archives would offer an online search of their historical catalogs, but the best you’ll find is a list of libraries holding the microfilms. Ancestry.com offers an online search, but only to paying members. I’m looking into this because I was looking for historical trends in consumer products and thought the catalog […] » about 100 words

Way Cooler Than A Catalog

I got a little excited when Shirley Lincicum wrote to the NGC4Lib mail list: [O]ne of the most frustrating things for me about Next Generation Catalog systems as they currently exist is that they seem wholly focused on the user interface and can, in fact, actually hold libraries back from designing or implementing improved “back […] » about 500 words

Scriblio Feature: Text This To Me

Take note of the “New Feature: Text this to your cellphone” line above. Adam Brin of Tricollege Libraries explained that the “text this to me” feature he built to send location information about items in the library catalog as text messages to a user’s cell phone is being used as many as 60 times a […] » about 100 words

Cataloging Errors

A bibliographic instruction quiz we used to use asked students how many of Dan Brown’s books could be found in our catalog. The idea was that attentive students would dutifully search by author for “brown, dan,” get redirected to “Brown, Dan 1964-,” and find three books. Indeed, the expected answer was “three.”

As it turns out, my library has all four of Dan Brown’s published books, including the missing Digital Fortress. The problem is that three books are cataloged under the more common Brown, Dan 1964-, but Fortress was cataloged under Brown, Danielle.

The problem is that cataloging is imperfect.

Yeah, it takes some marbles to say that, but the fact is that cataloging is a human endeavor. Humans make mistakes. The challenge we face is to build systems that tolerate error, and then make it easy to fix those errors when discovered.