phoebe ayers wrote:
On 12/22/06, Ilmari Karonen nospam@vyznev.net wrote:
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.
Yes, but I don't believe anyone was suggesting to cite a library catalog in support of a claim about all the books in the world -- that would be as absurd as basing a claim about all the people in the world on a single biography.
The difference is that, at least for some library catalogs, the subset of books they cover is well defined (all the books in library X) and of potentially legitimate interest in an encylopedia article.