Willard McCarty <MCCARTY@vm.epas.utoronto.ca> (02/06/90)
Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 3, No. 1008. Monday, 5 Feb 1990. Date: 3 February 1990 10:18:32 CST From: "M. R. Sperberg-McQueen " <U15440@UICVM> Subject: Why do you want telnet access to library catalogues? Perhaps I should direct the following question directly to Bill Ball or to Jim O'Donnell, but perhaps other members of Humanist will have responses to it as well. Why does one want telnet access to online catalogues at other universities? I'm assuming--perhaps incorrectly--that these other universities are ones at which one does not have borrowing privileges, except through one's inter-library loan service. My question is in part motivated by genuine curiosity, but there is also a bit more to it than that: When I was a graduate student, I looked in my university's card catalogue to determine whether the book I needed was immediately available. If it wasn't, I filled out an interlibrary loan form, indicating the source for my bibliographic reference, turned in said form, and generally received the item in question in due course. AACR2, the computer cataloguing of library holdings, and the public accessibility of said computerized catalogues has made what was a simple process in the halcyon days of 1975-81 when I was a grad student into an ordeal. My university library's card catalogue was closed off due to AACR2--and has not, of course, been entirely retrospectively converted to electronic form. Thus, as a minimum, I must now check both the card catalogue and our computerized catalogue to determine whether our library holds a given work. If it does not, I must then search another computerized catalogue to determine whether any library in my state library system holds the item. The state-wide holdings are in two separate databases, both of which must be searched, and the search commands for the two databases are different one from the other and from the search commands used for searching my own library's computerized catalogue. The search commands for one of these in particular are so far from being friendly that I think "hostile" not an inappropriate epithet. Should it turn out that I cannot find the item in the state, I must them search the OCLC catalogue to see if an OCLC member holds the item and to extract the OCLC number for my interlibrary loan department. (Another set of unfriendly commands.) If I strike out there, I must go to the NUC. After all this, the last thing I want is to be able to search other libraries' holdings on line. Yes, the ideal solution would be to have an interlibrary loan department that would do all this for you. Probably part of the reason mine doesn't offer such a service is that they lack sufficient staff (i.e., we're underfunded, and who isn't). But I suspect that there's another reason: I suspect that librarians have decided that having catalogues on line is wonderful and a blessing and a solution to all problems. They think they're doing users a service by making them available. And they think that on-line catalogues are so much better than card catalogues that they manage to overlook the fact that they are not always easy to use, that multiple databases with multiple search routines make the locating of an item a time consuming and often irritating task. Should we go back to card catalogues? Sometimes I wish we could: there's something very reassuring about their tangibility-- and the fact that they don't go "down." But no librarian I have ever spoken to seems to share my affection for card catalogues, so I guess that's out of the question. (I have also been bombarded with figures proving how expensive they are to maintain.) But at the very least I wish librarians would show a little more understanding for the fact that on-line catalogues are not immediate nirvana, and that they would agitate for more support for them and the users rather than simply presenting them to users and then leaving us on our own. It's wonderful that one can search so many databases. But I wish that libraries saw locating needed items for their users as one of the basic services they can offer their users (as, clearly, the interlibrary loan dept. at my grad. school did) rather than assuming that by giving us some tools they had relieved themselves of the responsibility for that service. I should hasten to add that the librarians at my university library are absolutely tops: when I ask for help with a search, they bend over backwards to assist--I never cease to be amazed at how willing they are to help one with one's work. The problem I seem to be carrying on about is, I think, at another level: while the persistent and pesky individual user can ask for and get help, there's no general procedure in place to assist those who are unwilling to pester the reference librarians or who lose heart earlier or who simply don't know how forthcoming the librarians are. And the user who like myself is willing to ask for help on a case by case basis uses/loses/wastes a lot of time in the process of asking for help for those many individual cases. This has turned into quite a little diatribe. But to return to the original question: I am genuinely curious what people are looking for when they want telnet access to other libraries. Do they simply want to verify the availability of an item? Are they hoping to find items they don't know of otherwise? (Which would, I assume, require that the catalogue in question had decent facilities for subject searching.) Are they trying to confirm the accuracy of a reference? (Which would assume that looking at a database entry is as good as autopsy--which is demonstrably not the case.) --Marian Sperberg-McQueen University of Illinois at Chicago