Sonny Software

I'm having problems finding books in the Library of Congress. I use "Library of Congress Z39.50" as an import filter; the other "Library of Congress" filter is not unicode savvy.

Today I searched for The Complete Collected Works of Georg Büchner who lived 1813-1837.
With "All Fields" selected, I tried

1. Georg Büchner The complete collected works
2. Büchner, Georg The complete collected works
3. Büchner The complete collected works
4. Buchner The complete collected works
5. Buchner complete collected works
6. Büchner complete collected works

No matches were found. Then I just entered Georg Büchner and received 264 hits. One of them was The Complete Collected Works.

What am I doing wrong?

I tried your searches on the Library of Congress web site and got results similar to yours -- nothing when you mixed author and title, 264 hits with Georg Büchner alone. You can write to their support address and ask why this is.

Note that when I did a boolean Library of Congress search (in Bookends) for

author = Büchner, Georg
title = The complete collected works

I got one hit, which I assume is the one you were looking for.

Jon
Sonny Software

Note that when I did a boolean Library of Congress search (in Bookends) for

author = Büchner, Georg
title = The complete collected works

I got one hit, which I assume is the one you were looking for.

Yes, now I remember, I did a similar boolean search a while ago when I was looking for something else, and it worked. Now I entered

All Fields = The complete collected works
All Fields = Georg Büchner

and the book was found right away. It wasn't even necessary to specify the author, "All Fields" was enough.

Thanks Jon. I will write to their support address and ask.

Jon wrote:I tried your searches on the Library of Congress web site and got results similar to yours -- nothing when you mixed author and title, 264 hits with Georg Büchner alone.

I'm not sure I understand you correctly. Did you repeat my search in *Bookends*, or did you perform the search on their web site with a browser? If you did it with a browser, what web site did you then use exactly?

I went to their web site https://www.loc.gov and clicked on the 'Library Catalog' button. That took me to "LC Online Catalog Quick Search" https://catalog.loc.gov.

There I entered "Georg Büchner The complete collected works" and I immediately got the one hit I was looking for. There was no problem.

In the meantime, I have discovered another online source with a defect "All Fields" button. That source used to work fine, but since the last one or two upgrades (?) something seems to be broken.

One of my favorite online sources in the past has been the university library of the Freie Universität Berlin. In Bookends the filter is called "Germany - FU Berlin.fltr"

As I mentioned above, this filter now shows a similar faulty behavior as the Library of Congress filter: when the search option is "All Fields", there are no matches.

More details:

1. I enter "Platon" with 'All Fields' and receive "There are no matches."
2. I enter "Platon" with 'Author' and receive "Number of matches: 1450"

Now, suppose I'm looking for Plato's Republic (in German = Der Staat).

3. I enter "Der Staat" with 'All Fields' and receive this error message:
4. Now I enter only the word "Staat" with 'All Fields' and this time I receive the message: "There are no matches."
5. I enter "Platon" with 'Author', and among the 1450 matches I get, there are three books with the title "Der Staat"!

So, presently there is no way to search for a specific title; Series Title and Keywords seem to be OK though.
This makes me believe that the search option "All Fields" in Bookends could have gone south and may not be working correctly by some online sources.

This makes me believe that the search option "All Fields" in Bookends could have gone south and may not be working correctly by some online sources.

How exactly does that work? The Bookends search does not change. Remote sites can change their protocols at any time and break things. Sometimes they can be restored, sometimes not, depending on what was done on the remote server.

Jon
Sonny Software

I just searched the Free University of Berlin library in EndNote and got the same result that you get in Bookends.

Search (in EndNote) for Platon in Any Field -> no matches. Search in Authors -> matches.

So it seems they don't support searching all fields any more, consistent with the error message you received from them.

Uncheck the All Fields option in the Bookends import filter and you won't have that obsolete option. See my last post.

Jon
Sonny Software