Re: Laundry list for NGC (long post)

Hey Amy,

I've just got a bit to add:

On Tue, Dec 12, 2006 at 10:00:54AM -0600, Amy Ostrom wrote:
>    *I want descriptions, dangit!  And why does no software exist for
>    integrating series information in the catalog??  I want to know what the
>    next book is!  (nothing like clicking on something you think you know what
>    it is, and then it really isn't.  I HATE that for something I might be
>    interested in, I have to go to Amazon first to find anything)
The main reason is that the formats that records are typically cataloged
in (various flavours of MARC), don't really have a standard way of
representing this information in a machine readable way (or if they do I
haven't been able to discover it).

It may be that somewhere in the morass of MARC series records there
is a way to extract the relationships between items in a given series.
Until someone enlightens me, or I have a chance to either wade through
the specification or figure out a way around it, the best way I know of
to help the user discover the next book in a given series is to:

1. present series links as a faceted result after a search for a given
work so that the user can limit the search to just that series:
http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/search?q=the+baroque+cycle

2. clearly mark the series title on the detail page as a link so that
the user can do a search for the rest of the series:
http://search.athenscounty.lib.oh.us/bib/133802

3. as much as possible, include the relevant non-coded (and therefore
not machine readable) series information so the user can see it when
looking at the record (see the detail page link above for the 'v. 1.'
indicator next to the Series link).

Anyone have any other practical ideas for how to solve this tricky problem?

Cheers,

--
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