And if you persist in wanting to perform an online subject search, prepare for real uncertainties and dashed hopes and deep screen-scrolling tedium. The big technical push in the early development of online catalogs was for “known item” searching, in part because some card-catalog studies seemed to show that library visitors don’t do all that much in the way of subject queries. Most of us come to the library, it was thought, with a specific writer or title in mind. In a monumental yearlong survey published in 1970, Ben-Ami Lipetz and his research assistants approached 2,134 pedestrians in the area of the card catalog at the Sterling Memorial Library at Yale, clipboard in hand, and politely said, “Please tell me precisely what you were about to do at the catalog the moment I interrupted you.” Eighty-four percent had a title or an author or a specific bibliographic goal in mind, and only 16 percent were interested in browsing a set of subject cards. At least, that is what the respondents said. Subject searches are somewhat embarrassing, especially if you’re a graduate student, and a graduate student at Yale (Yale graduate students used the catalog more than undergraduates, according to the survey, and faculty used it least): it sounds better to say that you want to take a second look at some curious laudanum stains on the endpapers of the Surtees Society’s Catalogi Veteres Librorum Ecclesiae Cathedralis Dunelm than to say that you’ve got to quick get some call numbers for a whole bunch of books under the heading of “Feudalism.” Subject searches are obvious confessions of ignorance; author-title searches aren’t, or aren’t so straightforwardly.
After online catalogs began appearing, though, it was possible to analyze searches without interviews, by studying the computer’s transaction logs. And scholars like Pauline Atherton Cochrane, of Syracuse University, found that people were very interested in subject searches — more interested now, possibly, because they (erroneously) thought that the computer would be better at them than cross-referenced card catalogs were. Sadly, online catalogs are still terrible at subject searches; their noise level, in the informational sense, is incredible. Card catalogs have the sense not to shuffle together alphabetically the myriad subheadings for “labor” in the medical sense and “labor” in the AFL–CIO sense; the online catalogs I’ve seen don’t. Card catalogs don’t lump subheadings for traffic control in Alexandria, Virginia, together with ones for the lost library at Alexandria, Egypt, either. The “See also” card at the beginning of a set of subject entries in a card catalog didn’t yank you to another part of the catalog, and abandon you there; it just suggested that you might want to expand your search in various directions if you didn’t find enough where you stood. There is nothing like this yet in any but the best online catalogs, and even these have peculiarities. (If you look up “Greyhounds” on HOLLIS you won’t be advised to see also “Dogs”; and if you look up “Dogs,” and choose selection 1, which “retrieves information on the use of the above headings,” you will puzzle over this brief note: “subdivision Dogs under groups of Indians, e.g., Indians of North America — Dogs.”)
Nor is there an equivalent for guide cards — those beauties that stick up above the rest, with typed headings — which form a sort of loose outline of knowledge built into the trays, and help you to keep your bearings, and teach you as you go. Card catalogs are “precoordinated,” whereas online catalogs are still almost entirely “postcoordinated,” which means that the burden of figuring out how the universe of subjects ought to be organized has been shifted away from the cards and onto you, the user, who must now master Boolean “AND NOT” filters and keyword trickery and crabwise movement by adjacent call numbers merely in order to block avalanches of irrelevancies.
I have no doubt that it will all get better. That’s the wonderful thing about software: it gets better. Soon it will be possible to browse big subjects like the Bible or Film or the Mafia or Pollution in a productive way, as we formerly could, instead of despairing when we get a message saying YOUR SEARCH RETRIEVED 1,028 RECORDS. A thousand records, remember, is only a little more than one card drawer. My fingers could arpeggiate Lisztlessly through them, the lead hand’s fingers feeding card clumps to the trailing hand, scanning, rejecting, repositioning, in a minute or two. But online, a thousand records is instant death right now. “Studies of online catalog use and users have uncovered a pair of problems that seem to be endemic in today’s online catalog systems,” Ray Larson, a professor at Berkeley’s library school (or, as it is now called, the School of Information Management and Systems), wrote conclusively in 1991:
These are: (1) a large percentage of subject searches fail to retrieve any bibliographic records; and (2) when subject searches succeed in retrieving records, they often retrieve too much material for the user to evaluate effectively.
Larson cites an earlier study of his own in which he found that the average number of online records retrieved in his sample was 77.5, whereas the average number that users actually took a look at was 9.1. The “futility point” in online searches — the point at which you give up and go with what you have — is, because of screen fatigue and the sequential lethargy of system response, much lower than in card-catalog searches. The life of the mind suffers as a result.
Not so for experienced onliners, you may contend — those who have developed a feel for Library of Congress subject headings, and may even have the now indispensable four-volume Library of Congress Subject Headings open beside their keyboard — but if this is the case it is because, as Professor Larson neatly points out, “part of the experience acquired by ‘experienced users’ is frequent search failure and information overload when subject searching.” Larson goes as far as to say that online catalogs “are, in effect, conducting a program of ‘aversive operant conditioning’ against subject searching by their users.” You could, in fact, go Larson one better by hypothesizing that online catalogs are acting to reinforce the tendency toward mindless academic hyperspecialization, since any attempt to venture into areas in which one is a novice, using the library’s basic search tool, is met with the sharp electric shock of a long search warning. Certainly it is truer now than ever that if you want your scholarship to be read, you had better find a way to maneuver it into the early letters of the alphabet, because online, nobody’s getting much past the “G”s and “H”s.