OT: Re: Alphabeticisation ?

[Kay C Lan]

On Thu, Apr 17, 2008 at 2:29 AM, Mark Wieder <mwieder at ahsoftware.net> wrote:

The University of California's Doe Library went to a closed stack
> system some years ago for some obscure bureaucratic reasons. The
> (backhanded
> obligatory Arthur C Clarke reference) serendipity of contextual proximity
> is
> what we've all but lost with the demise of open stacks and physical card
> catalogs.
>
> OK, I'm not a Librarian, but my wife is and so I asked her and this is
what she discovered just now.

She can access the University of California's Doe Library via the internet
from halfway across the planet,  in fact she can access every University of
California Library by a system called Melvyl - which is the front end for
OPAC (Online Public Access Catalogue - my wife normally uses a system called
Oliver)

Through Melvyl and OPAC you can search by:

Title,
Title begins with
Journal Title
Journal Title begins with
Author
Keywords in name
Author last name first
Author organisation
Author/Title
Subject
Keywords
ISBN
ISSN

My wife says Universities generally don't use Dewy because the system is
designed for small collections, Universities uses Library of Congress system
which provides finer categorisation for more accurate searches.

My wife who teaches 'Information Literacy' at University to graduates,
typically School Librarians, laughs at 'card' systems as being 'way too
restrictive' and that if you couldn't find a host of books on any given
subject with Melvyn, then you're an idiot - her words not mine.

For Richmond, my wife checked out the University of Durham Library which is
also online and indicated there you can ALSO search by:

Classification mark,
Shelf mark,
Place of publication,
and in Arabic or Chinese language.

She tried to access the Plovdiv National Library but couldn't, although from
her limited perspective it appeared that they were transferring to an OPAC
system and that their catalogue may become available online at some future
date - again, that is her impression, not necessarily reality.

So, next time you're off to the library Richmond you could simply do a
search of the online catalogue at Durham Uni, get a bunch of book names
within the subject of interest and take the list to Plovdiv to see if they
have any of them.

Lastly my wife indicates that in general the physical book collection at
libraries are getting smaller, and should be, to reflect the reality that
access to more accurate data is readily available via the internet. If a
library these days has an encyclopedia collection, then the librarians
aren't doing their job.

OK, can we go any further OT ;-)