Another Encore

Since nobody else seems to be reporting on this, I'll keep going. Yesterday, I was looking for search examples on a page I keep of Innovative Interfaces catalogs that are particularly good (You can find this page at http://faculty.quinnipiac.edu/libraries/tballard/webpacs.html). To my surprise, Michigan State has now gone public with their Encore site. You can try it out at

http://catalog.lib.msu.edu/screens/encore.html. They say it is under development but it seems nearly identical to other Encores I've seen.


Now I will explain why I was searching other catalogs. A colleague complained that when she searches for the Statistical Abstract of the United States in our catalog, she gets four hits, and the real record displays at the bottom. I found out that records containing a 710 field with a subfield t have that subfield display in a title search. I then made a list and found out the 900 other titles contained this field, and some of the hits were just bizarre. For instance, if you search for the title Laws, etc. you get hundreds of matches. I searched Harvard, OHIOLINK and others and found, to my dismay, that this is standard cataloging procedure. It is, in my opinion, and example of cataloging procedure being at odds with patron needs and expectations when searching the catalog.