[WEB4LIB] Re: What is wrong with Online Catalogs (was: In defense of stupid users)

[Jimm Wetherbee]

Karen,
| 
| Because the ultimate bell & whistle is the one thing we don't do, which is
| give the user the experience of searching not our own controlled
| vocabulary but the item itself.
[--jimm replies] I think we are in substantial agreement here.  The online
catalog in some ways seems to promise more than it can deliver.  If it comes
with full array of natural language searching, full Boolean operators, and
so on, we are disappointed when we discover that most of what we need can be
done with simple author title or subject searches.  It really doesn't matter
how simple or complex the user interface looks.
| 
| I'm not saying we abandon the world of metadata, or even of the idea that
| structured information has its advantages, but that we have to leverage it
| against full-text discovery. 
[--jimm replies] Again, I agree.  I think we must have both.  Let us assume
that we have full text searching to some 20 million titles.  What that
translates in terms of words is phenomenal, especially when one compares the
ratio of words to web-pages or even words to journal articles.  No, one
can't have an effective search on books without a controlled vocabulary.
What is needed is a way to adapt the vocabulary to the user rather than the
other way around.

--jimm

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