The Potential Usefulness of Catalog Access Points Other Than Author, Title, and Subject

Library patrons who wish to obtain a known document with which they have had prior personal contact often cannot remember the standard author-title-subject information about it with sufficient accuracy to be able to look it up easily in present-day card catalogs. However, they may remember a surprising amount of such "nonstandard" information as the color of the document's cover or its approximate length. Could this type of "nonstandard" information be profitably exploited in computerized catalogs of the future? Such facilities, if available, would surely be used, for according to catalog usage surveys a majority of today's library patrons seek known documents, and of these, a substantial minority possess nonstandard information. In this report, the results of a memory experiment to test the memorability of various types of nonstandard information are described and analyzed. A ranking according to relative memorability and potential retrieval usefulness of various nonstandard book features is given. It is estimated that if the average patron's nonstandard information were exploited by appropriate retrieval strategies, he would only have to search through roughly one five-hundredth as many documents as in a random search. This reduction factor is great enough to make nonstandard information potentially useful in many situations.