RE: Data on circulation of books

["Mcsean, Tony \(ELS\)" <T.Mcsean@elsevier.com>]

Many, many years ago when I was running a university library tech 
services department, I would have little moments of despair that 
all the effort that was going into cataloguing was still 
resulting in a catalogue that gave such horribly inadequate 
subject access to the monograph collection.  We would break our 
backs resolving author ambiguities, digging out place of 
publication and so on but for the most part the subject approach 
was little more than mark and park.  This varied a bit across the 
disciplines - I used to fret particularly about all those social 
science monographs that didn't seem to be "about" anything at 
all, using the definition that our subject tools were built 
round.

Back in the 1970s, full-text searchability of monographs was wild 
talk by late-evening visionaries, but it surely accommodates 
better the way we produce our own mental indexes of the good bits 
within monographs, and therefore will drive usage of older 
material.

Tony McSean
Director of Library Relations
Elsevier
London NW1 7BY