LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ON BOSNIACA
FIRST READING
Kemal Bakaršić

Background

My student Saša Madacki final paper for his B.A. in Librarianship had to anwser a simple quiestion how to find Bosniaca in the libraries whose holdings (catalogs) are avaiable as OPAC or trough Internet WWW.
(Rewiew of this "Experiment Bosniaca on WWW" will be avaiable at CUPRIJA site after oral exsamination scheduled on December 12, 1997)
One of the Appendix of his paper brings a result (fwd. as an e-mail message) of the query asked to a host computer in the Library of Congress (www.weblc2.loc.gov) date June 17, 1997.

Query had a format:

  • Place = SARAJEVO
  • Duration = 0000-1997.

Total 2.854 record were found and lisited in short format.

The First Reading

Marked red are noticed mistakes in language indentification. At least 41 per cent (1.172 references) were wrongly identified, mostly using Polish instead of Serbo-Crooatian language.

Example:

Prorucnik za nastavu srpskohrvatskog jezika (uz udzbenik "Nas jezik" i "Zbirku kontrolnih zadataka" za VI razred esnovne skole).
1967 Minovic, Milivoje. [Polish]
Sarajevo, Zavod za izdavanje udzbenika, 1967.
LC: PG1219 .M5

Marked blue are noticed other typing mistakes involving less than 1 per cent of listed references.

Example:

Uvod u estetiku.
1972 Focht, IVan. [Polish]
Sarajevo, Zavod za izdavanje udzbenika, 1972.
LC: BH39 .F64

Downloded list is "cuted" alphabeticaly in separate files, and "taged" for html purposes. Note that headers marked ??? have insufficient ordering informaion, but obviously belongs to the list.

Question

Recognizing holdings and catalogs avaiable as OPAC or trough WWW as a rich and usefull resourses on basis of which bibliographers will reconstruct "missing" Bosniaca bibliography, and later librarians will reconstruct "missing" original holdings for the benefit of the National and Univeristy Library of Bosnia and Herzegovina a simple question could be asked:

Will thise efforts vice versa help in improving the contents of exsisting on-line catalogs?

Kindly note that this debugging of the Library of Congress holdings on Bosniaca is accidental case study - not a tentaive or targeted criticism.

Sarajevo,
December 5, 1997

© Kemal Bakarsic and Cuprija Friends