Grassroots experiment

[Sarah Boling <sboling@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Most of us have at one time or another heard a patron explain very
earnestly that they couldn't be sure of the title or whether the author's
name was Fleming or Grumlin or something like that, but they KNEW the book
was red.  The traditional cataloging rules have always dodged this vital
descriptive issue.

While generally respecting the need for sticking to cataloging procedures
uniform across the library community, and resisting local Balkanizations
even if they seemed to be on the side of common sense, I have come to
believe that the feasibility of using this most important finding tool in
an OPAC environment deserves investigation.  We have established a "limit
by color" function and a "search by color" function in our OPAC.  The
actual indexing and programming of the limit function were done by
Innovative, to whom we are duly grateful.   

Exact hue identification is of course a serious problem.  Color is very
subjective, people's color vision varies, and a book is a different color
in a north-facing room, a west-facing room, a room lit by artificial
light, or next to a yellow book.  A book's color can also vary by several
shades after it has sat on a cataloging workroom shelf too near the window
for a year because its relationship to the works it was derived from is
all fussy.  However, difficulties were made for man to overcome.

Adding the book's color to a bibliographic record does not significantly
slow down cataloging workflow.  It takes in fact less time to identify a
book as green than it does to ferret out a metric ruler and verify that it
is 27 cm. tall. The subjectivity of color identification can be largely
eliminated by limiting the available choice to one of 15 basic hues.  The
only other stumbling block is that color identification has never in the
last hundred years been part of the work of library cataloging, the MARC
format and AACR2 don't support it, and it is either eccentric or heretical
to embrace it.  It is, however, spring.

In honor of the day, I offer the results of our tinkering to any
interested parties.  http://portia.nesl.edu, hornbooks are green, the
'limit' function is offered after any multiple-hit search, and for the
utterly typing-challenged,
http://portia.nesl.edu/screens/well_its_red.html

Sarah Boling
New England School of Law Library
sboling@xxxxxxxxxx

My employer is not responsible for anything I think up.