Although I may have been silent on the discussion lists, I have always agreed with Bernhard and Mac on where our effort is needed. In an article composed some years back, I tried to to explain why attention to indexing and display is absolutely critical today. I assumed at the time that the concept of the catalog was still alive and well. I fear now that it may be a lost concept, or at least a concept without supporters in high places. Its instructive that FRBR talks about user tasks. We used to call those catalog objectives. What is a catalog these days? However one defines it, one thing we might all agree on is that a catalog is not a gumbo. It is not a mess of records (as they say in the South), however good and well-constructed those records might be.
One stab at a definition is that a catalog is a controlled set of ordered presentations of bibliographic data (themselves rule-bound) in response to and support of certain defined user tasks. Before computers our cataloging rules/principles supported by filing rules were sufficient to turn our records into a catalog. Not so now. Today's catalog is a marriage of catalog records and the ILS (alas, a troubled marriage). Bad enough that those constructing the records and those controlling the catalog usually have separate job descriptions (how many combined cataloger/systems people do you know?). Worse, our rule makers are changing our principles and are studiously sidestepping systems issues (indexing, display, etc.). As I see it, we haven't got a chance and might as well stop right now genuflecting to our well-loved catalog objectives. Sorry to be so pesimistic, but I dont know how else to explain the current climate. E. Spanhoff Bernhard Eversberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: It is unfortunate that AACR never had filing rules, for that meant that vendors and developers felt free to choose the easiest approach, whatever that meant in the context of their product. (Filing has not become irreleant, it translates into indexing today. Not subject indexing, but the creation of the index files that all searching is internally relying on.) There were long exchances on the subject in the pre-conference mailing list for the 1997 AACR conference: www.loc.gov/catdir/bibcontrol/specific.pdf This came to nothing - It was only German experience that could be quoted, and it was only me who voiced it and Mac who supported it. Even earlier, on Autocat around '95, I had sent a whole series of postings under the title "Face the interface". To the same effect, but Mac took up the very same subject now. I suppose the whole matter is utterly hopeless, and RDA developers will care for neither OPAC interface in general nor filing rules in particular. The official view, I think, places this outside RDA's scope. J. McRee Elrod wrote: > > When we speak of "keyword searching" do we not also mean phrase > searching using quotation marks"? > It seems like, meanwhile, everybody assumes something like this. There can be no doubt from where this understanding originates. But to the best of my knowledge, there's no such thing as a standard that would specify it. And in fact, does "keyword" have any standardized meaning? Is there an agreed-upon algorithm for keyword extraction from strings? And for phrase matching? How, for instance, are hyphens to be treated, apostrophes, diacritics, other special characters? This belongs, IMHO, to the basics of OPAC design and should be rooted in the cataloging rules. For if the details of indexing are still left to implementers, RDA will give away some of its potential from the start, cross-border searching will not improve much. Or which one of the now 37 chapters deals with indexing? I may have missed it... B.Eversberg Elisabeth Spanhoff [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------- Looking for last minute shopping deals? Find them fast with Yahoo! Search.
