On 12/22/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam(a)vyznev.net> wrote:
<snip>
None of the problems previously mentioned with legal databases apply to
library catalogues, which I would rather compare to
other common
catalogue works such as phone books and dictionaries. In fact, ten or
twenty years ago, one could even have pointed to the filing cabinets
full of index cards and said "here's your printed source". :-)
The problems are exactly the same; they're the same sort of beast. A legal
or other bibliographic database indexes articles, proceedings and books that
are published in some pre-determined subset of all the journals in the
world; a library catalog indexes books that are held in a particular
institution (a subset of all the books in the world). A catalog is simply a
database of books; see
worldcat.org.
Sorry to get all semantic,
phoebe