Libraries at University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Date of this Version
June 2007
Abstract
One of the many ways to meet the challenge of offering users a better search experience—and to continue the library's existence as a “growing organism” (Ranganathan)—in the current information atmosphere is to provide more text to search against, just as Google's Book Search does. One method for achieving this is to add tables of contents (TOC) and summary notes into a catalog's bibliographic records for books, thereby offering additional, highly relevant search terms into a library's database. While adding access points is not a new notion, libraries can start to meet users' expectations by providing them with more information about the books included in library catalogs. This paper explains how the addition of tables of contents (and some summary notes) to a library consortium's local catalog provided positive results, especially when weighed against the costs of incorporating them into the catalog.