Books are most easily found by ISBN if you wish to buy them. To find them in a library or if they don't have an ISBN author and title (supplemented by publisher or binding information) works best. Many libraries us Dewey Decimal rather than Library of congress classification. To find all the editions of a book you have one ISBN for a further search for author and title will produce them on a good search engine like ABE or if they all have an ISBN on AddAll.
Not all books that have ISBNs have Library of Congress numbers or are in the Library of Congress. (Two copys of any book copyrighted in the US go to the Library but not all are put in the collection and cataloged). That includes many books published in the past that don't have ISBNs too of course.
If a book published outside the US is in the Library of Congress Collection it has a LC number, but it almost always has an ISBN (the ones starting with something else than 0 or 1 which cover the US and UK.). This leaves out several hundred thousand books published each year (about 100,000 in Spanish).
Practically a link to a good author title search like the AddAll used search is probably the best thing we can give our users. I think the How to Find a Book has progressed enough that it could be included in at the bottom of that page clicking on an ISBN takes you to, but don't freeze it just yet, it doesn't have how to use OCLC (World Cat) on it yet.
Fred
At 09:53 PM 9/18/02 -0700, you wrote:
Eclecticology wrote:
The LC Classification does have many benefits, but it remains a subject based listing, and as such involves a great deal of subjectivity. Would a book of the correspondence between an American and a French novellist, for example, be included in the PQ or the PS class? An author with multiple interests would have his works all over the place. What's more some libraries are free to deviate from LC to meet the needs of their own particular conventions.
Of course, this is no argument for ISBN in preference to LC; it's only an argument for author/title. I think that LC is better if we can make it work.
The author/title approach probably remains the best basis.
My worry here is that this isn't very conducive to look up by computer, since the spelling can vary (not only foreign names, but prepositions and articles in the titles). If we have people look these up in the LC catalogue, then they might as well look up the LC number as well.
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