Lesson #5: Points of Access

Reflection #1:

Study the above information. Reflect on how students and teachers could access data about this particular book. What would be the most common ways? Title, key words in the title, author, subject, or key words in the subject.

Comments:

The provided bibliographic record is clear and concise. If students have been taught how to use the school library catalogue, and how to locate materials in the library non-fiction section, this record provides a very complete picture of what they would find if they went to the call number listed. I think that looking up "nursery rhymes" as the search would be the most useful, as it would come up both under keyword search and subject search.

Reflection #2

Consider the reading for this week by Connors and discusses how the catalogue record and the rules around choosing 'access points' are evolving.

I am old enough to remember the days of doing research using a card catalogue. I actually loved doing research (my first year of university was in 1981) and was fascinated by the treasure hunt nature of looking in the card catalogues, then going off into the book stacks to find books and journals. 

That experience seems to have nothing to do with accessing information these days. Accessing the readings and information for this course, for example, is a good example of the new way of becoming informed, and how the necessary information is disseminated. There aren't even any books involved, only website addresses.

It is still essential to be able to identify resources in a library. I would say that the minimum for a point of access is the title of a work. However, depending on the physical nature of the resource (book, map, DVD, CD, realia), the way to identify it would have to change. 

The way a resource is identified also depends on how the library's particular cataloguing system works, and what information is deemed relevant. As the article discusses, the future seems to be about multiple access points and collocating a resource. In the end, as long as the resource can be found on the data base and found in the physical sense in the library, then archaic rules seem irrelevant in this new age of computer data bases.