[WEB4LIB] Reality check -- card catalogs don't support graph structure?

[me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au]

At 7:11 PM 1998/08/24, Nick Arnett wrote:
> Am I correct in saying that the standard catalogs do not contain graph
>structures?  That is to say, every subheading has just one parent heading?
>Another way to put this is that a subheading cannot appear in more than one
>place in the catalog.

My gosh, occasionally I have wondered how few graphs LCSH (Library of
Congress Subject Headings) could be expressed in.  I suspect the answer is
probably not one but a pretty small number. LCSH is very highly connected.
Classificaltions like Dewey, UDC, Bliss, Harvard-Yencheng, Library of
Congress etc are tree structures but not serious aids to information
retrieval being more useful for browsing.

LCSH linkage through "See" and "See also" references and the implicit "Seen
from" provides a wealth of crosslinks to tie the structure together, as
well as the heading subdivisions.  Good thesaurus systems are much more
systematic about this eg MESH.

>This is going into a section on enabling serendipity.  Graph structures
>support serendipity in more dimensions than trees, but were unworkable as
>long as catalogs were stored on cards.

Unworkable is a bit strong.  I well remember as a young librarian plodding
from one See also to another and leaping from one part of the alphabetical
sequence to another. Nowdays you can do it quick as a flash in a web
enabled OPAC. Of course you also have the hyperlinks to the author and to
the classification to enrich the approach and in some OPAC systems this
predated the web.

So -

>I'd also be curious if there has been any effort to bring graph structures
>into the established cataloging systems.

They are there already. What I havn't seen is something along the lines of
"Get me all the books within N nodes of this one".

Tony

_______________________________________________________
   mailto:tonyb at netinfo.com.au      | Ningaui Pty Ltd
  mailto:me at Tony-Barry.emu.id.au    |   GPO Box 1680
http://purl.oclc.org/NET/Tony.Barry | Canberra ACT 2601
      Phone +61 2 6241 7659         |     AUSTRALIA