Kate drones on about cataloging

This post by Chris Anderson, the “Long Tail” guy, is very interesting. Anderson points out that different musical genres (classical, pop, jazz) are searched for differently:

But I was interested in Amazon’s classical music store for another reason: classical is a genre that the one-size-fits-all music aggregators such as iTunes don’t handle particularly well. They’re oriented around pop music, with its artist, album, track data format. Meanwhile classical music organizes around composer, conductor, performer, soloist, etc. … However, neither of them does a very good job with Jazz, where the individual musicians are often more meaningful than the band.

He goes on to point out that IMDB does a better job of allowing searching/linking by individual performer than Amazon and iTunes.

So, what collections or genres in our libraries (digital or not) could benefit from customized searching abilities? HmmmMMMMMmmmmmMMMMMM.