1.1 Categorizing historical documents: what is a red book?  (Page 3/5)

Once you're in WorldCat, type the title into the text box provided and then select Title in the pulldown menu.

The second search result looks like our work.

The information we are most interested in for now we find under the heading Subject(s).

The list is relatively short, only twenty-five entries. The second descriptor beginning with Egypt is reserved solely for "The Egyptian Red Book" so weare dealing with a manageable number of works. For now, let's just mark all of these entries and email them to yourself so we will have them for later stages in theproject.

Scroll down to the bottom of the page until you see the Mark all option.

Note that our list makes several mentions of "Punch" and "The Westminster Gazette," which area nineteenth-century periodicals. These publicationsare included in our list under a dated subject heading; thus we can be confident that they were in publication at the same time as our work. When we look for similarworks in the collection at the library in the next section, we should be sure to explore their periodicals as well as books on our subject.

Limits of finding works by subject headings

It is interesting to note here that one very similar work does not appear in our list of works that share a subject heading with the "Egyptian RedBook." It is a work that we discussed in our "Identifying the Characters of the Egyptian Red Book Module" entitled "The Irish Green Book." It is important to note this here for a few reasons. First,this valuable resource for our research would have remained undiscovered if we had not explored a variety of options, rather than simply one or two. Second, this kindof oversight is indicative of the limitations of a system that attempts to categorize works by general subject. It is important that we develop anunderstanding of the limitations of our techniques and resources so that we may overcome them. Let's locate the Irish Green Book on WorldCat and comparethe subject headings.