Interesting idea. I have hear some special collections and arrives that do
something with printable finding aids although they serve a slightly
different purpose. I need to think about what the specific use case would
be, but it doesn't seem like it would be a ton of work to do this.
Incidentally, while not really the same idea, many years ago I investigated
using VUFind to do something like this. Obviously, it wasn't printable but
people could search just out multimedia collection and I also experimented
with doing this with the collection of educational resources. I changed
jobs before it was implemented, but in testing it seemed pretty usefully -
especially the multimedia collection since in out catalog at the time they
were hidden and being a residential campus, students liked to borrow ones
that were not only educational, but entertaining. Of course this was before
Netflix, et al. existed.
Edward
On Tue, Oct 24, 2017 at 7:56 AM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I think a “kewl” (as well as cool) idea is the creation of mini-catalogs.
>
> Our libraries have large collection. That’s nice. But often the
> student/scholar only wants to look at a smaller subset of the collection.
> For example, they might want to look at only the books about painting.
> Alternatively, they might want to only look at items in a particular sub
> collection — a “special” collection. Unfortunately, and to the best of my
> knowledge, our library catalogs are not really amenable to such things.
>
> In order to facilitate greater use & understanding of these sub
> collections, I think it would be fun to:
>
> 1. dump all the MARC records describing a sub collection
>
> 2. generate a set of text files intended for printing,
> and these text files would manifest a VERY traditional
> library catalog [1]
>
> 3. generate a computer-searchable index designed to be
> used by a hand-held device [2]
>
> 4. promote the use & availability of the outputs of
> Steps #2 & #3
>
> What’s kewl is that the text files can be given away, printed, and even
> (“Gasp!”) written in. They require zero technology, and can last a long,
> long time. Heck, they are even portable and copies can be placed at the
> head of the collection(s). In days of old, librarians paid hundreds of
> dollars for these sorts of “catalogs”. They can still be valuable today.
>
> What’s more, the computer-searchable indexes and can be carried into the
> stacks and used like a Star Trek tricorder to home in and browse the
> collection(s). A bar code reader on the “tricorder” would be a helpful
> interface.
>
> Fun with the blending of newer and older library techniques?
>
> [1] example set of printed catalogs/indexes -
> http://dh.crc.nd.edu/sandbox/pamphlets2indexes/
> [2] example computer-searchable index - http://dh.crc.nd.edu/sandbox/
> pamphlets2analysis/search.cgi
>
> —
> Eric Morgan
> University of Notre Dame
>
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