Today I saw a tweet from Library and Archives Canada that their catalogue, Amicus, will be down from this afternoon until Sunday evening.
For some reason Amicus seems to be unavailable one a somewhat regular basis. What's up with that?
Anyway, if you were planning on doing any Amicusing you should either do it now or be prepared to wait until Sunday afternoon.
Showing posts with label Amicus. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amicus. Show all posts
Friday, May 04, 2012
Thursday, July 03, 2008
A Few Quick Notes 193
-Aside from a few rain drops, today has been a rather nice day. Possibly even more important than the quality of the weather today is that fine weather has been predicted for the next few days (a prediction that I hope comes true).
-Today when searching by ISBN in Amicus I had 5 records returned for a single ISBN. While it is likely that this is not the record in this category, it is a much larger number than I would have expected. One would hope that only a single record would be returned for most ISBNs.
-It is possible that I have secured a house-sitting gig for the latter part of July. If this works out it would tie in nicely with my early August house-sitting obligation.
-I really dislike serials that under-go name changes. Not only have such changes caused me to have nightmares but they are also a bit of a pain to catalogue and I can't imagine that many people are able to follow the changes.
-We had a frisbee game. We all seemed to play much better this time around. In the end we managed to hang on to the lead long enough to secure the win.
-A few of us went to Bitters for trivia. Unfortunately, we didn't do all that well, but better than at least two teams. We were particularly hammered by a comic book category on which we scored zero.
-This year I have seen a number of very large ants. I don't recall seeing such creatures in past year. I wonder if Newfoundland has a new invasive species.
-Today when searching by ISBN in Amicus I had 5 records returned for a single ISBN. While it is likely that this is not the record in this category, it is a much larger number than I would have expected. One would hope that only a single record would be returned for most ISBNs.
-It is possible that I have secured a house-sitting gig for the latter part of July. If this works out it would tie in nicely with my early August house-sitting obligation.
-I really dislike serials that under-go name changes. Not only have such changes caused me to have nightmares but they are also a bit of a pain to catalogue and I can't imagine that many people are able to follow the changes.
-We had a frisbee game. We all seemed to play much better this time around. In the end we managed to hang on to the lead long enough to secure the win.
-A few of us went to Bitters for trivia. Unfortunately, we didn't do all that well, but better than at least two teams. We were particularly hammered by a comic book category on which we scored zero.
-This year I have seen a number of very large ants. I don't recall seeing such creatures in past year. I wonder if Newfoundland has a new invasive species.
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
A Few Quick Notes 192
-Today has been another nice day. Amazingly, the higher temperatures did not make my walk to work particularly unpleasant.
-While yesterday was both Memorial Day (until noon, and in Newfoundland and Labrador only) and Canada Day I didn't participate in any of the available activities. Instead of an active member of the community I stayed at home and kept to myself, and eventually got around to chopping up several pounds worth of vegetables.
-The celery that I am eating right now is not particularly good. Neither the flavour or texture meet my exacting standards.
-Instead of book marking or remembering the URL for the Amicus, each day I go to Google and search for it.
When I first started doing this some number of years ago I learned that the first hit was actually for a union in the UK, rather than the Canadian union catalogue. Eventually I trained myself to go to the correct link (though it took a fair bit of time).
At some point in time, though I don't really know when, this union was dropped to a lower position by Google.
Just today I unfortunately found that the union has once again been returned to the prime position for the 'Amicus' search. Maybe I will have to try and post the link in a few places to get my preferred Amicus back in the prime spot.
-In the coming days Neil will be moving to a new apartment. This is particularly important to me because as of late August this will be my new apartment. Hopefully the move will go well and the transition to the new apartment will be smooth and painless.
As I was able to send many of my goods to Halifax when I left Montreal many of my belongings will be in the apartment when I arrive. Furthermore, the plan is to have Neil and Rebecca unpack all of the communal type objects and put them away, thus preventing a major re-arrangement of items once I arrive.
-Will I get my diploma? This is something that I have been wondering about since I missed my graduation ceremony about a month ago. I would have thought that McGill would have just mailed it to me, but I guess that hasn't happened yet. Maybe if I don't see any action on this front I will have to look into the matter.
-While yesterday was both Memorial Day (until noon, and in Newfoundland and Labrador only) and Canada Day I didn't participate in any of the available activities. Instead of an active member of the community I stayed at home and kept to myself, and eventually got around to chopping up several pounds worth of vegetables.
-The celery that I am eating right now is not particularly good. Neither the flavour or texture meet my exacting standards.
-Instead of book marking or remembering the URL for the Amicus, each day I go to Google and search for it.
When I first started doing this some number of years ago I learned that the first hit was actually for a union in the UK, rather than the Canadian union catalogue. Eventually I trained myself to go to the correct link (though it took a fair bit of time).
At some point in time, though I don't really know when, this union was dropped to a lower position by Google.
Just today I unfortunately found that the union has once again been returned to the prime position for the 'Amicus' search. Maybe I will have to try and post the link in a few places to get my preferred Amicus back in the prime spot.
-In the coming days Neil will be moving to a new apartment. This is particularly important to me because as of late August this will be my new apartment. Hopefully the move will go well and the transition to the new apartment will be smooth and painless.
As I was able to send many of my goods to Halifax when I left Montreal many of my belongings will be in the apartment when I arrive. Furthermore, the plan is to have Neil and Rebecca unpack all of the communal type objects and put them away, thus preventing a major re-arrangement of items once I arrive.
-Will I get my diploma? This is something that I have been wondering about since I missed my graduation ceremony about a month ago. I would have thought that McGill would have just mailed it to me, but I guess that hasn't happened yet. Maybe if I don't see any action on this front I will have to look into the matter.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Amicus, where did you go?
Soon after I arrived at work today I logged into Amicus, the Canadian National Catalogue, as is my practice. All seemed to be going as normal until about an hour or so into the day. All of a sudden I seemed not to be able to complete my searches, and then eventually I became unable to even access the splash page.
Assuming that this was a brief glitch I decided that I would leave it alone and come back in a few days. As I checked back during the problems were clearly still persisting.
Eventually I thought that maybe there would be an update or explanation somewhere online. Unfortunately, as the entire Library and Archives Canada site was inaccessible the most obvious location for such a notice was unavailable. In the end I tried to look in a few place, all of which turned up nothing. As I am pretty sure that there must be a message board with comments related to this occurrence I may have to continue my searching tomorrow (even though the problem has now been resolved).
Not surprisingly, with Amicus down, I decided to head over to the Library of Congress catalogue, assuming that their classifications of particular items would be pretty authoritative. Once in the catalog I learned that they too were having service problems. In this case the message I received indicated that they had reached their maximum user capacity.
While it is quite possible that this is what happened, I wonder if they were operating at diminished capacity as I have a very hard time believing that it is such a popular site that it would max out its capacity. Who knows, maybe I hit prime East coast cataloging time. As I don't use the service as much as I use Amicus I am not really in a position to say that this doesn't happen every day at that time.
Hopefully everything will be back on track tomorrow and their to serve my classification related needs.
Assuming that this was a brief glitch I decided that I would leave it alone and come back in a few days. As I checked back during the problems were clearly still persisting.
Eventually I thought that maybe there would be an update or explanation somewhere online. Unfortunately, as the entire Library and Archives Canada site was inaccessible the most obvious location for such a notice was unavailable. In the end I tried to look in a few place, all of which turned up nothing. As I am pretty sure that there must be a message board with comments related to this occurrence I may have to continue my searching tomorrow (even though the problem has now been resolved).
Not surprisingly, with Amicus down, I decided to head over to the Library of Congress catalogue, assuming that their classifications of particular items would be pretty authoritative. Once in the catalog I learned that they too were having service problems. In this case the message I received indicated that they had reached their maximum user capacity.
While it is quite possible that this is what happened, I wonder if they were operating at diminished capacity as I have a very hard time believing that it is such a popular site that it would max out its capacity. Who knows, maybe I hit prime East coast cataloging time. As I don't use the service as much as I use Amicus I am not really in a position to say that this doesn't happen every day at that time.
Hopefully everything will be back on track tomorrow and their to serve my classification related needs.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
Good but not quite great
Over the past few weeks I have had to frequently use Amicus, the Canadian National Catalogue, a service maintained by Library and Archives Canada. One of the important feature of this service is that it shows which libraries (of those that participate in the program) have copies of particular items. Also, Amicus acts as the catalogue of Library and Archives Canada, Canada's national library. While this is typically a relatively pleasant experience, there are a few quirks that I haven't been able to figure our, or don't quite like.
One of the more useful features relates to call numbers. When Amicus lists the various libraries that have a particular item they also indicate whether or not it is available for inter-library loan, and what the local call number is. This last feature is something that I have been finding increasingly useful as one tends to be able to view a range of call number, or classification numbers, that have been assigned to a given book. Not only does this help overcome some of the inadequacies of the Library of Congress Classification schedules indexes, it can give some insight into how others have approached the classification of a particular item.
Unfortunately, poor indexing makes finding particular items more difficult than it should be. Because the catalogue records are culled from catalogues maintained by other libraries, not all records are of the same quality or follow the same rules. One of the most problematic and noticeable of these irregularities is the frequent inclusion of the leading article in the 'title' field. Because articles are not always included or ignored one has to perform two searches, one with the article and one without, when browsing a listing of available titles.
A related problem is one of multiple records for the same item. As records are gather electronically, without human interference, even small differences result in an additional record being created rather than the integration of the holdings information into a single record (as would be desirable). While I do see that this is a difficult problem to overcome it makes looking for items with minor differences difficult, particularly if the records lack detail and specificity.
More interesting is that sometimes a library's catalogue will show that they have something, but the item is not reflected in the location list in Amicus. At first I thought that this must be associated to update frequency and changes to the local catalogue, but upon further inspection it seems that items catalogued years ago are not being reflected in the Amicus records. Now that my seemingly plausible theory has been shot down I have no idea what explains they differences.
In a more limited number of cases the opposite of the above situation occurs. In some cases Amicus indicates a library has something but then the library's own catalogue indicates that they do not actually have the item. Fortunately, I am not involved with inter-library loan activities, but if I was I am sure that these problems would be pretty frustrating.
One of the more useful features relates to call numbers. When Amicus lists the various libraries that have a particular item they also indicate whether or not it is available for inter-library loan, and what the local call number is. This last feature is something that I have been finding increasingly useful as one tends to be able to view a range of call number, or classification numbers, that have been assigned to a given book. Not only does this help overcome some of the inadequacies of the Library of Congress Classification schedules indexes, it can give some insight into how others have approached the classification of a particular item.
Unfortunately, poor indexing makes finding particular items more difficult than it should be. Because the catalogue records are culled from catalogues maintained by other libraries, not all records are of the same quality or follow the same rules. One of the most problematic and noticeable of these irregularities is the frequent inclusion of the leading article in the 'title' field. Because articles are not always included or ignored one has to perform two searches, one with the article and one without, when browsing a listing of available titles.
A related problem is one of multiple records for the same item. As records are gather electronically, without human interference, even small differences result in an additional record being created rather than the integration of the holdings information into a single record (as would be desirable). While I do see that this is a difficult problem to overcome it makes looking for items with minor differences difficult, particularly if the records lack detail and specificity.
More interesting is that sometimes a library's catalogue will show that they have something, but the item is not reflected in the location list in Amicus. At first I thought that this must be associated to update frequency and changes to the local catalogue, but upon further inspection it seems that items catalogued years ago are not being reflected in the Amicus records. Now that my seemingly plausible theory has been shot down I have no idea what explains they differences.
In a more limited number of cases the opposite of the above situation occurs. In some cases Amicus indicates a library has something but then the library's own catalogue indicates that they do not actually have the item. Fortunately, I am not involved with inter-library loan activities, but if I was I am sure that these problems would be pretty frustrating.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Bad cataloging
On Thursday I was looking for an item, in which form I would find the item I wasn't quite sure. Fortunately, I had what appeared to be a largely complete citation. My first step was to look in our catalogue, which unfortunately yielded no positive results. From there, I went to the uncatalogued section of the library and quickly, with the assistance of a co-worker, located the related series of documents. After a quick skimming of the titles I came to the conclusion that we did not have what I was looking for. It seemed as though my next option would be to find the item in an electronic form, the odds of which seemed pretty good as it was a government document.
In just a few moments I was able to find something that appeared to be the document in an online location, though I was not sure if it was the same version of the document that had been cited, as the citation did not include a description or page number. I was quickly becoming aware that the citation with which I started wasn't as complete as I would have liked, something that is frequently quite an inconvenience and cause for much time wasting.
From the vast open plains of the untamed Internet I turned to the more restricted confines of Amicus, the catalogue of Library and Archives Canada. Again, within just a few moments I was able to find something that resembled the item I was looking for, though my skepticism was rising with each new approach.
Unfortunately, there were major differences between several of the records in the union catalogue (which is what Amicus is) that I was searching. The physical descriptions of the items varied drastically from record to record. In two or three cases the item was supposedly 18 pages long, in others it was 89, and some just indicated that it appeared on pages 72-89 of some other document (without saying which document).
Eventually, once I turned back the to those fruitful unfenced plains that we call the Internet, I was able to find a reference to the original form of the item indicating that it had been a paper published as part of a collection of papers with a collective title. From there I was able to recall seeing the title on the shelf and then use the pages numbers indicated in some of the Amicus records to locate the item.
This experienced has caused me to reaffirm my belief that the use of proper citation formats is critical, if not for the average reader than for the future researcher or librarian (or library worker). Additionally, analytics, or the practice of creating separate catalogue records for discrete intellectual entities found within larger bodies of work, needs to be undertaken with great care because it otherwise runs the risk of making the task of identifying a particular item more difficult. It also seems that certain institutions supplying catalogue records to Amicus need to improve their quality control, otherwise the usefulness of Amicus might become greatly diminished.
On the other hand, without such mistakes I would be able to have the satisfying experience of finding something that was marginally more difficult to find than it should have been. To modify and reverse an opinion jokingly expressed by my cataloging professor, bad cataloging keeps reference librarians employed.
In just a few moments I was able to find something that appeared to be the document in an online location, though I was not sure if it was the same version of the document that had been cited, as the citation did not include a description or page number. I was quickly becoming aware that the citation with which I started wasn't as complete as I would have liked, something that is frequently quite an inconvenience and cause for much time wasting.
From the vast open plains of the untamed Internet I turned to the more restricted confines of Amicus, the catalogue of Library and Archives Canada. Again, within just a few moments I was able to find something that resembled the item I was looking for, though my skepticism was rising with each new approach.
Unfortunately, there were major differences between several of the records in the union catalogue (which is what Amicus is) that I was searching. The physical descriptions of the items varied drastically from record to record. In two or three cases the item was supposedly 18 pages long, in others it was 89, and some just indicated that it appeared on pages 72-89 of some other document (without saying which document).
Eventually, once I turned back the to those fruitful unfenced plains that we call the Internet, I was able to find a reference to the original form of the item indicating that it had been a paper published as part of a collection of papers with a collective title. From there I was able to recall seeing the title on the shelf and then use the pages numbers indicated in some of the Amicus records to locate the item.
This experienced has caused me to reaffirm my belief that the use of proper citation formats is critical, if not for the average reader than for the future researcher or librarian (or library worker). Additionally, analytics, or the practice of creating separate catalogue records for discrete intellectual entities found within larger bodies of work, needs to be undertaken with great care because it otherwise runs the risk of making the task of identifying a particular item more difficult. It also seems that certain institutions supplying catalogue records to Amicus need to improve their quality control, otherwise the usefulness of Amicus might become greatly diminished.
On the other hand, without such mistakes I would be able to have the satisfying experience of finding something that was marginally more difficult to find than it should have been. To modify and reverse an opinion jokingly expressed by my cataloging professor, bad cataloging keeps reference librarians employed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)