Bibliographic Management of Information Resources in Health Science Libraries

Citation

Guha, M. (2001), "Bibliographic Management of Information Resources in Health Science Libraries", Library Review, Vol. 50 No. 5, pp. 263-263. https://doi.org/10.1108/lr.2001.50.5.263.10

There are quite a number of textbooks on cataloguing already on the market at the moment. I am not entirely convinced of the need for another. On the other hand, this seems to me to be quite a good one. This is part of an eight‐volume series which replaces the old Medical Library Association’s Handbook of Medical Library Practice, originally published in one volume. I am not sure that cataloguing has really got eight times as complex in the past half‐century. In some ways it has got simpler, and there is certainly some evidence of padding here and there in this book. Nevertheless, there is some useful material here – guides to classification, subject analysis, authority control, thesaurus construction, and a chapter on automation in bibliographic management that simply swamped me with acronyms. By the time I reached “To aid in the development … of URNS, OCLC has introduced … PURLS. Functionally, a PURL is an URL … ” I had to go and sit down with a cup of tea to recover.

The chapter on authority control struck a resonant chord. My own institution recently merged with another, resulting in a catalogue which contains entries under both “Genetics, medical” and under “Medical genetics”, and cross‐references saying “Tumors see cancer” and “Cancer see neoplasms” thus sending enquirers on a merry dance through the system. Unfortunately, just as we try to impose authority on our readers’ searching, they start branching out on to the Internet, where there are no indexing controls at all. This volume does not even start to face up to the problems the Internet gives us, which are basically those of designing an indexing/searching tool intelligent enough not to need an authority file.

Quite reasonably, the emphasis here is entirely American, with no real consideration of services offered in other countries. Bearing this in mind, however, if your library does not have an up‐to‐date textbook on cataloguing this volume might be worth considering.