Re: [ARSCLIST] MIC and cataloguing

[Karl Miller <lyaa071@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 20 May 2005, George Brock-Nannestad wrote:

> All of this is really best done by means of a thesaurus structure (controlled
> vocabulary). Time invested in creating a full set of authorized descriptors
> and maintaining it is to the good of all, but obviously to the cost of those
> who do the work. In a previous posting I have lamented that with the
> appearance of fast hard drives, the perceived need for thesauri disappeared -
> sequential sorting being resorted to. But really, it is the only way of
> mastering a field and obtaining precision in retrieval. Just think of the
> fact that anything misspelt in the wrong place of a word will not be
> retrieved using the correct form of that word.

Yes, thesauri can be of great help, but once some shell of a system is
established, can it not be refined dynamically?

I wonder about the functionalism of the subject heading in music. Perhaps
some can tell me what its place might be these days.

Robert Ashley's "In memorium - Crazy Horse : Symphony isn't a Symphony,
even if one bib record 53116114 says it is (gives the recording the
subject heading Symphonies). But then the Guide to Subject headings
doesn't give us much information as to when to use that term, so we look
in the dictionary, and find that the term has had different meanings over
the years, so maybe Ashley's work is a Symphony because he calls it a
Symphony.

If we are looking for Symphonies for band, true, a subject search should
versus keyword could narrow down the number of results, however, how many
patrons are likely to think to type in Symphonies (Band) or Symphonies
band?

As for misspellings, if a spell check can offer a limited range of
possible "corrections" to a word I may have misspelled, why not have a spell
check for those entering data? I know that connexion does not offer this.

Speaking as one who, as a library student assistant, would photocopy extra
copies of the main entry card and then type analytics, I still don't
understand why (or it at least, so it seems to me) that the process of
cataloging hasn't changed much since the inception of the MARC record,
which in a sense, was just an attempt to automate the process of making
cards...and to provide shared information...just in the way we would
photocopy cards from other dictionary catalogs. What am I missing in this?

I also wonder about notions of description when there is no object, just a
digital file of audio. While I have seen several approaches to this, any
citation on the fundamental notions of "description" without an object
would be of interest. From the examples of such cataloging I  have seen,
there seems to be an attempt to adopt the notion of a file into the
mindset of an object. This seems to me to be as much at cross purposes as
using a system to make cards for a shared digital information resource.


Karl