The search engine can search within the following fields:
Keyword, Title, Author, Subject, Main Text, Front Matter Back of Book, Publisher, Place of Publication, ESTC Number
Advanced searches can put a starting point and an endpoint on the range of years of publication, check off any number of subjects, look for works in a particular language, and look for particular illustrations.
The primary difference between us and ECCO here is that we cannot do Main Text searches, account for certain types of illustrations, and lack ESTC numbers, as far as I can tell. We can definitely put a range on years of publication, and most of the other information is searchable or accessible in one way, shape, or form. The subject checking in ECCO is confusing for me - there is a huge array of subjects, which include "History and Geography", "Fine Arts", "Literature and Language", "General Reference". Thus, ECCO broadens its utility, but we would seem to be much more focused on a subsection of one particular field, their "Literature and Language" section. That said, it's not always clear to me that we are in that subsection. They seem to have a lot of things that we would include in other sections, as well. For example, I found a set of educational, fictional epistles that were listed under General Reference. This should stress to us the importance of a glossary - we need to be at least relatively transparent about why we sorted certain information in a particular way.
I strongly suspect that ECCO is limited partly by its needs to be as comprehensive as it is. Its comprehensiveness seems to be its main selling point, something that we don't currently value as highly. The fact that it has so many volumes available limits it in some regards. The clearest example is that one can only browse by subject, author, and title. The more interesting kinds of advanced searches include year of publication, words in front of book, and number of illustrations. This may work against us in the sense that it takes longer to catalog and will also introduce a lot of "noise" into searching, but part of the advantage of faceted searching is that this "noise" can be filtered out. At any rate, ECCO does not lack for "noise", either - it does not pre-sort works in any way, shape, or form, and thus more or less assumes that people will already know what they are looking at once they initiate a search. They do have some really interesting ways to sort within books, like an eTable of Contents, which I'm not sure how they do.
We might talk about searching practices at some point, because since I am somewhat limited in what researchers actually do, I can only make conjectures. Still, ECCO is a little bit worrisome because it evades a lot of issues we're tackling head-on. For example, it does not make any claim to be a database of novels, though it certainly includes them. The opening statement is that it "includes books, pamphlets, essays, broadsides, and more", but the database subsequently doesn't really help you sort among them. In contrast, we are looking specifically at works of fiction, mostly novels, and are paring away differences between novels with fields like the narrative form field or book format field.
Their "browse" function begins by being alphabetical by title, and is somewhat analogous to just wandering down a stack of books. It is likely that something will be found, but alphabetical by title browsing alone is a hard thing to manage. The best thing about it seems to be "fuzzy searching", which I'm not sure I understand yet, either. It has a broader but somewhat different information outlay than we do. We have a sort of small-business advantage in this regard - we don't have to appeal to any potential scholar of any field within the era spanned.
No comments:
Post a Comment