Why do online library catalog searches always default to "Key Words Anywhere"?

Because library websites are often designed by people to whom the idea of computers and the internet is still relatively foreign? People who use phrases like “Web 2.0”? People who are entirely flummoxed by the phenomenon that is Twitter, but spend a lot of time thinking about how much Twitter flummoxes them and how they have to use “the Twitter” if they’d like to ever talk to anyone under the age of 30 again? Or maybe this is just the libraries I’m familiar with…

The online version is the same database and search engine as the one in the library. People usually approach a library catalog looking for topic references. If they know the author, they can look on the shelves.

For title searches, people probably don’t have the whole title. A keyword search will return titles too.

@zenvelo People usually approach a library catalog looking for topic references. If they know the author, they can look on the shelves. I disagree, both that people approach a library catalog looking for topic references and that if they know the author, they can look on the shelves. I have only searched my schools library catalog for topic references once; the rest of the time, I’ve used Google to find which books I want and only use the library catalog to figure out if we have those books and where they are. And at least at my library, you can’t easily figure out where a book will be. You have to look up what section it’s filed in, and exactly what its Library of Congress code is, or else you’ll never find some of these books.

@Aethelflaed If that’s how you were taught to find references on a subject, I stand corrected. When I look up a subject on Google, I am rarely given book references, I usually am given websites in return.

If I want to look at all the possible references, I look up the subject in a card catalog, the browse the subject area on the shelves to view what’s available on the subject.

@zenvelo That’s how they teach you to research in school. There are tricks to finding books as sources (ie Google Scholar, Google Books, finding the sources listed on Wikipedia or .edu websites, emailing someone who has a blog on the topic what sources they used), and… we aren’t taught to ask “what sources does the library currently have that I can use” but rather “what sources do I need, and then how do I use interlibrary loans and whatnot to get my hands on that source”. If I’m doing a project on depictions of Marie Antoinette in propaganda, and our library has 7 books on Marie Antoinette total (none of which deal with her in propaganda except to say in passing how the depictions exist and bummed her out), I don’t give up and change topics to something my schools has both lots of books on and books that haven’t been checked out yet, I find the books from some other library and have them sent to my campus.

@Aethelflaed I kind of dispute your first contention; many, if not most, librarians are amongst the savviest users of the Internet. Sorry if your experience has differed.

As far as keyword coming first, it is an interesting question. I think I would have to see statistics to decide what is searched most – keyword or title. I think I am usually searching topically with students rather than for specific titles but I have no hard data to back that up.