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

[L. Hunter Kevil]

Nick,

Someone else will correct me if I am wrong, but I believe you are right:
subject
subheadings can appear in only one location in the catalogue.  One of the
long-standing "business rules" of standard cataloguing is that all
procedures should be possible
in card catalogues as well as machine-based catalogues. (Support for this
point of
view may finally be dwindling.) That is why we have automated card
catalogues, not
automated catalogues. Another business rule is that every heading must be
unique. This implies that the heading + subheading are viewed as a unit,
which should "file" in a
unique location.

Good luck with your book.

L. Hunter Kevil
University of Missouri-Columbia
internet: mulkevil at showme.missouri.edu
tel: 573-884-8760
fax: 573-884-5243

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib at webjunction.org [mailto:web4lib at webjunction.org]
On Behalf Of Nick Arnett
Sent: Monday, August 24, 1998 9:14 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Reality check -- card catalogs don't support graph
structure?


For the book I'm working on, I'm making some comparisons between hypertext
catalogs and libraries that use standard cataloging, such as Dewey and LOC.
 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.  Yet another way to say this is that typical library
catalogs are trees, whereas Yahoo! and catalogs like it are graphs.

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

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.

Nick