Finding subjects in an online library catalog

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There are two difficulties with subject headings in a library catalog. For one thing, you must know what the subject heading is before you can search on it. For another, not all libraries use the same subject list. At first, it seems worse than the old complaint that you can’t look up how to spell a word in the dictionary unless you know how to spell it. In the days of card catalogs, patrons had little choice but to make their best guess and hope to find something. College and university libraries, which overwhelmingly use Library of Congress Subject Headings, used to keep the whole list–all four or five volumes of the so-called “Red Books”–out where patrons could use them. I used them from time to time and never had to stand in line. In fact, most patrons probably did not use them or even know what they were for. The nice thing was that I could make my guess, look in the “Red Books,” and if I was wrong, would very likely find a cross-reference. Unfortunately, the abbreviations for the various kinds of cross-references were devised by librarians for other librarians. They were hard for non-librarians to understand  or … Continue reading →

Finding names in an online library catalog

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The strength of a library catalog is something called “controlled vocabulary.” That is, there is one and only one way to express a subject or the name of a person, organized group, or legal jurisdiction in a catalog. You don’t have to know what it is; there is something called an authority file running in the background to  help you. This article is about names, not just authors. For one thing, it includes not only personal names, but names of groups, companies, government jurisdictions, etc. For another, any of these kinds of names can be not only the author of something, but some other relationship (such as illustrator or editor) to something, or a subject of something. Personal names In an earlier post, I mentioned the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger. The official way to express  his name in a catalog used to be “Ratzinger, Joseph, 1927-,” but as soon as he became Pope, the official way changed to “Benedict XVI, Pope, 1927-.”  No one would ever guess either form, although everyone is used to the convention of last name first from the phone book. I had no idea what the correct form was until I just looked up “Ratzinger” in … Continue reading →

How an online library catalog differs from Google

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Some librarians love to bash Google, as if it has no redeeming qualities for serious research. Others (well, probably not many librarians) claim that Google is so far superior to online library catalogs that the only way to save them is to make them as much like Google as possible. Well, I think Google is great, but it is not a library catalog and cannot find things that an online library catalog can. Google cannot find anything that is not online, including lots of library materials. Even Google Books has its problems. I will have something more to say about it in another post, but as I was playing around with it, I entered the title of a book that was sitting on my desk, published only about thirty years ago. Google Books couldn’t find it. Then I looked for my own book, The Trombone: Its History and Music, 1697-1811 (New York: Gordon and Breach, 1988) using my name (with middle initial) as the search term. There it was, about six items down. (My second book doesn’t come out until next year. Where did all that other stuff come from?) There was no link for finding it in a library, … Continue reading →

How do you find anything in a library catalog?

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The simple answer is that you can look by keyword, author, title, or subject. Just type your search terms in the appropriately labeled box and look at whatever results come up. Sounds like Google, only not quite. The more complicated answer is that a library catalog is a database with separate indexes for keyword, author, title, subject, and so on. Unlike the Web, they are structured in such a way that there is only one official way to express a name (personal or geographic), title, or subject. They are also structured in such a way that you do not have to know these official forms before you begin a search, but if you can recognize them, it’s a lot easier to make sense of your results and refine your searches. Catalogs result from intellectual work! I must confess that before I got my first library job, I used the card catalog a lot (that should date me!). But it never occurred to me that some individual actually wrote the descriptions on all those cards. I never stopped to think that someone actually determined the form of the author’s name, the way the title was written, the subject headings, etc.! And … Continue reading →