Re: searching for obscure objects

[Judy Pinnolis <pinnolis...>]

Helen:
I hope the following will help.

I took the liberty of taking a look at your local University of Calgary
catalog online. What you have is a catalog of books and holdings
specifically for that UofCalgary library. The "web cat" is basically your
card catalog put on a web interface. Your library uses a vendor called
"Sirsi" which is one of the major vendors who supply library system
applications.

So, the answer is "No", Web Cat and World Cat are totally different things.
World Cat is the title of the catalog interface for OCLC, which is a huge,
central catalog of millions of library records (meaning items) from several
thousand libraries and located in Ohio. The World Cat is often available
through a company called FirstSearch. You may wish to search World Cat to
find more titles worldwide in your subject field. 

Your library provides direct access to this OCLC World Cat. Go to your
University of Calgary's library main home page. Click on "catalogues" which
will take you to a page called "catalogues of other libraries". Scroll down
until you see OCLC WorldCat. You will need a university verification number
to enter this database. You may want to ask for help at your library to
find out how to get that number.

I did a simple search on your local library catalog at University of
Calgary and found that there are at least 20 titles in the catalog under
the keyword search:

dance and (jews or jewish). 

There were several books in your library's catalog on Jewish dance you may
have seen, but aren't listed on your bibliography on you webpage. I don't
know whether it's because they're just not that good and you felt that they
weren't worth listing, or if for some reason, you've missed them. For
example, there's another dance book by Fred Berk not listed on your page.
So, you may want to take another look at that. 

You should also try other searches using variations of keywords and finding
the subject headings on the books that are appropriate, you can use those
same headings to find more books. You can also try more journal literature
searches  in the arts and humanities databases available at your library.

Your bibliography seems quite excellent to me. I can tell you  (from
personal experience :-)  ) it sometimes takes years to build a good
bibliography...so keep on going and keep building it. You are providing a
wonderful service and encouraging people all over the world in Jewish dance.

Best wishes,
Judy



At 02:50 PM 6/7/00 MDT, you wrote:
>Our library (University of Calgary) is on Web Cat--is that the same thing as 
>World Cat?
>
>What I have found is that there doesn't seem to be a lot published in the 
>way of actual dance descriptions.  The little book I found from 1942 is by 
>Nathan Vizonsky and describes 10 dances and has music for each dance.  
>However, the descriptions are more for the stage than for recreational 
>settings.  I understand there is quite a bit written in Hebrew.  Slowly I've 
>been coming across bits and pieces of dance information in books and have 
>been posting it on my web page.  But very little of it is comprehensive 
>enough to completely describe the dance so that you can do it or teach it to 
>anyone.
>
>The most frequent comment I get from people who visit my page is that they 
>have never heard of these dances before.  They've only come across Israeli 
>dancing.
>
>Helen
>
>
>Helen Winkler
>Helen's Yiddish Dance Page
>http://www.angelfire.com/ns/helenwinkler
>winklerh (at) hotmail(dot)com
>
>________________________________________________________________________
>Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com
>
>
>

Judith S. Pinnolis
Reference Librarian
Coordinator for Publications and Training
Brandeis University Libraries
Goldfarb Library MS045
P.O Box 549110 
Waltham, MA 02454-9110
phone:781-736-4705
fax: 781-736-4719
email: pinnolis (at) brandeis(dot)edu

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