We've had several points of view expressed:
-- One person said the stacks are better than the
card-catalog.
-- Another person said the card-catalog was better
than the electronic version.
Taken together, those imply stacks > catalog > search-engine,
although somebody else said stacks > search-engine > catalog.
I'd like to offer yet another version:
search-engine > card-catalog > stacks.
Look at it from the librarian's point of view: take
for example Yariv's book on quantum electronics:
should it go under quantum mechanics or electronics?
(One could well argue neither, it belongs under optics.)
But in any case, it won't be in the stacks near the
other N-1 topics, unless the library is so small that
everything is near everything else, in which case it
is useless anyway.
This is a !!fundamentally!! unsolvable problem. Human
knowledge is high multi-dimensional. LCCN or Dewey or
other numbering system is one-dimensional, and stacks
are just a folded one-dimensional representation. And
(drum roll, please) there is a !!theorem!! that says
that you can't change dimensionality in a way that is
one-to-one and continuous. I call this the "flower-
pressing theorem". It !!guarantees!! that related
ideas will be found in non-contiguous locations in
the library.
Related idea: I archive all the email I receive, going
back to the invention of email. You may ask how I
file it. Suppose I get an email from Yann about the
physics of computation. Do I file it under Y for Yann,
or under P for physics, or under C for computation, or
all of the above? Answer: none of the above. I file
them in no order at all. I rely on a search engine to
find them when I need them. I can retrieve the example
message by searching on "Yann physics" or "Yann computation"
or "computation physics" or in various other ways. It
would be a colossal waste of my time to try to sort them
when they come in, trying to guess what query I will
want to use at some distant-future date to retrieve them.
This posting is the position of the writer, not that of SUNY-BSC, NAU or the AAPT.