[WikiEN-l] The boundaries of OR (contd)

[phoebe ayers]

On 12/22/06, Ilmari Karonen <nospam at 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