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

[Daniel P. B. Smith]

> No, the accurate statement is "This specific online search by Daniel
> P.B. Smith on this specific date did not return any results". And, of
> course, there's no guarantee that 1 minute after Daniel P.B. Smith
> does his search, the book will not be acquired, or entered into the
> catalog, or re-indexed properly because it had been improperly entered
> before, or...

There's no guarantee, but if someone tries the search a minute later  
and gets a different result, and it's not from some transient glitch,  
they can edit the claim or remove it.

> Databases, library catalogues, and similar ephemera are complex beasts
> that have little in common with printed works.

There's no guarantee that two different physical copies of the same  
printed work have the same contents, either. I can tell you from  
personal experience that there are in existence copies of songbooks  
published by SPEBSQSA that have identical titles, paginations,  
copyright dates, credits for the arrangements, etc, yet have  
significant differences in the notes on the page. We usually find it  
out when the chorus starts singing and different guys in the same  
section are singing different things. If you ordered it in 1990, you  
got a different arrangement than if you ordered the "identical" book  
in 1980. Someone at the Society thought it was OK to correct or  
improve the arrangements without any indication that anything had  
changed.

I don't believe for a minute that this is the only example of that in  
the world.

It's highly _likely_ that it wouldn't be true of a book by a  
respectable publisher--they'd bump the number of the printing or  
something. It's also highly likely that two queries to an electronic  
library catalog, a minute apart, will yield the same results