A Forgotten Feature of 3.0 not in 4.0- Remote Library Search
First I want to say I love all the new improvements and features in 4.0 but in the area of missing features this one seems to have been forgotten. I have used and will continue to use the remote library search to see all that an individual author has written that are in the Major theological libraries of the World. I can also search by Subject, title, ect. I would like to see this feature in 4.0. Maybe a lot of people didn't use it or knew that it existed
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John Brumett said:
First I want to say I love all the new improvements and features in 4.0 but in the area of missing features this one seems to have been forgotten. I have used and will continue to use the remote library search to see all that an individual author has written that are in the Major theological libraries of the World. I can also search by Subject, title, ect. I would like to see this feature in 4.0. Maybe a lot of people didn't use it or knew that it existed
Wow, I didn't even know that existed.
I use worldcat.org all the time for this kind of research. It's awesome.
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If you have 3.0 go to File-New-Remote Library Search. Maybe if enough people are aware of it we can see it implemented in 4.0. Whose with me!
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Actually this feature was left out by design. We were told that because so much of this data could be discovered in other ways with the growth of the Internet that it was not a feature that the design team felt should be retained.
The original thread is in a hidden beta forum and inaccessible, but Thomas Black quoted from it on this thread: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/7852/62207.aspx Look for his quote of Bob Pritchett.
Pastor, North Park Baptist Church
Bridgeport, CT USA
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John Brumett said:
If you have 3.0 go to File-New-Remote Library Search. Maybe if enough people are aware of it we can see it implemented in 4.0. Whose with me!
Thanks. I just tried it. Neat.
Mark A. Smith said:Actually this feature was left out by design. We were told that because so much of this data could be discovered in other ways with the growth of the Internet that it was not a feature that the design team felt should be retained.
The original thread is in a hidden beta forum and inaccessible, but Thomas Black quoted from it on this thread: http://community.logos.com/forums/p/7852/62207.aspx Look for his quote of Bob Pritchett.
Worldcat can indeed do this, but it was nice that Logos 3 had a feature to be able to restrict the search to theological libraries only, which I don't know of any other way to do. Nevertheless, I can understand Logos dropping this, as it does seem that this wasn't a core feature. Keeping up with all the theological libraries that go online could be a nightmare. (I noticed they didn't have my seminary library in the list in L3; I don't think it's catalogued by WorldCat yet but surely it will allow remote catalogue searching at some point in the future.)
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Worldcat as far as I know doesn't have a simple list view like Remote Library Search in 4.0. Does Worldcat have a way of organizing hits by Library? Would this feature be hard to implement from a programing point of view in 4.0?
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John Brumett said:
Worldcat as far as I know doesn't have a simple list view like Remote Library Search in 4.0. Does Worldcat have a way of organizing hits by Library? Would this feature be hard to implement from a programing point of view in 4.0?
The main purpose for WorldCat is to help people find a copy of a book they're looking for in a library near them, so the organizing principle of "Find a copy in the library" is city or zip/postal code. It will show you the libraries where a work can be found within a certain radius of that city or postal code. To keep people from putting too much of a load on the system, it will only show the closest libraries, not every single library that contains a particular work. I can't imagine the latter being useful information for anyone anyway.
Is this what you're looking for in a "simple list view"?
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I can also sort my search results by author, title, publisher and library by clicking on the title bar. Plus there are several ways I can choose by information to be displayed by Bibliographic Citation, MARC Record, MARC Record (LOC Style) and Brief Bibliographic
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A list view of libraries that have a certain author and all the titles by that author not libraries that are near my location.
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John Brumett said:
A list view of libraries that have a certain author and all the titles by that author not libraries that are near my location.
I'm not sure why you'd need to know ALL the libraries that have a certain author, since you can't possibly visit them all, though I'm sure you have a good reason. If it's a rare book that only a couple of libraries (even far away from you) have a copy of and you're looking to find out so you can get hold of it via Inter-Library Loan or something, worldcat will show you all the libraries that have it. They just won't show you all the libraries that have a common book, since that would be a huge list. I think they limit it to 25 hits or something. Again, I am not sure I see the point in getting a longer list of libraries than that, unless it's just for curiosity.
If you want to know all the titles by an author, you can search in the Library of Congress catalogue (http://catalog.loc.gov). They have just about every book that's ever been published. And you can get all the publication info about each book from there:
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Oh, and you can sort by author, title, and date. Not publisher or what library it's found it (of course it's in the Library of Congress only):
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What if I want to find out all the books that an individual publishers carries by a particular author. For example I want to find all the titles that Zondervan has by John Walvoord. I could go to the Zondervan web sight and do a search but books that are out of print will not be listed. Also some older titles have been picked up by other publishers. I can see this easily in the Remote Library Search. It brings allot of the Theological Library together in one place.
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John Brumett said:
What if I want to find out all the books that an individual publishers carries by a particular author. For example I want to find all the titles that Zondervan has by John Walvoord. I could go to the Zondervan web sight and do a search but books that are out of print will not be listed. Also some older titles have been picked up by other publishers. I can see this easily in the Remote Library Search. It brings allot of the Theological Library together in one place.
Good point. I guess there are enough reasons to want that feature back again. I'm sure Logos thought long and hard before deciding not to bring it over from L3, but as has been shown before, sometimes they didn't fully understand what users were using features for. They've been willing to rethink such decisions if enough users mount a case for it. They did that for SmartTags, for example. So I'd encourage you to add an entry to UserVoice for this and see if you can drum up some more enthusiasm for it here on the forum and direct people to it to vote on that feature.
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This is a sore spot with me. I love remote library search!
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