[Web4lib] re: How to label the OPAC

[David Walker]

Bernhard wrote:

>> How do you explain what Google lists and what 
>> it doesn't? Aint't no easier than with the catalog...

Which brings us back to my original point.  

It is rather easy to describe the library catalog if you just stop
thinking about it as a single system.  The problem is that we keep
thinking of it as a single system, and are groping to find a single
label for it.  Once you realize that the catalog is actually several
collections and tools, you can conceptualize and label each of those
separately.

On your homepage you can put links like this:

* Books
* Videos
* Music
* Journals and Newspapers

[etc.]

Books can go to the homepage of your catalog, or if you have a
metasearch system, to a page that gives the user many options to find
books.  Vidoes can go to your catalog with a limit for videos already
pre-set.  The same for Music.  Journals and Newspapers could go to a
page that includes your catalog's search for journal and newspaper
titles as well as your article databases.  And so on and so on.

In that way the website itself becomes the search tool (the "catalog" if
you will), and the OPAC is simply one portion of it (or rather several
smaller portions of it).

That's how Google works too.

--Dave

=================
David Walker
Web Development Librarian
Library
Cal State San Marcos
760-750-4379
=================


-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Bernhard Eversberg
Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 11:40 PM
To: web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] re: How to label the OPAC

David Walker schrieb:
> 
> But an OPAC is not a *complete* list of the library's holdings.
Neither is any search engine a complete list of web contents. How do you

explain what Google lists and what it doesn't? Aint't no easier than 
with the catalog...

> 
> If we want to insist on using the term "catalog" in libraries,  ...

At least, there are good explanations we might point to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog
No talk there about the terms probable obsolescence.

-- 
Bernhard Eversberg
UB Braunschweig
Tel. 0531 391 5026
E-Mail: b.eversberg at tu-bs.de
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