Martha Yee wrote:
“Research in catalog use is very difficult to carry out for a number of reasons.
I've been trying to find a copy of the report that Karen Markey did for the Future of Bibliographic Control meeting in Mountain View. In it she has a grid that has subject knowledge on one axis and library catalog knowledge on another. And users can have or not have either of those and so you end up with a grid that is something like: yes subject/no catalog yes subject/yes catalog no subject/no catalog no subject/yes catalog The bottom left (at least in my grid) are what she calls the "double negatives" -- people who aren't knowledgeable about the topic they are researching, and who aren't knowledgeable about how to use the library catalog. The key thing that I'm missing is that I believe she had been able to put numbers to these -- does anyone have a copy of her report? (We really should get it up on the FoBC web site if it is available.) In any case, I think this echoes some of the issues that Martha states in her quote, that some users are entirely at sea, both in their topic area and in the library. What I really like about the both the facets that some catalogs are now offering and the topic maps that some attempt (not always very successfully), is that the catalog itself is suggesting additional directions both in terms of using the catalog but also in terms of browsing in the topic area. This seems to me to be a rich area to explore, especially if we are able to implement more of the relationships that FRBR outlines between entities and between works. I do suspect, however, that to do this successfully we will need to utilize different data structures for our bibliographic data, some of which are made possible by RDA. kc -- ----------------------------------- Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.kcoyle.net ph.: 510-540-7596 skype: kcoylenet fx.: 510-848-3913 mo.: 510-435-8234 ------------------------------------
