So instead of making some informed guesses about whether they entered a call number or a subject, we make them tell us. We should be making computers do this. Names are fairly easy to detect if you compare the search words against a dictionary, limiting the search to appropriate name fields automatically. If the search is not a name, perform a combined title and subject search and determine the top five subject headings from the returned records. By clicking on one of the topics, the user would be using controlled vocabulary terms limited to a particular field in the record, all without knowing anything about the underlying complexity behind it.
Ignorance is no defense.
Errors of omission can have as substantial a set of consequences as errors of commission, so we must try to understand the unintended consequences of both what we do and what we fail to do. He is founder and manager of the electronic discussion lists Web4Lib and Current Cites. Go to Digital Libraries archive. LJ Copyright 2000. All rights reserved.