What ABOUT the book? Google-izing the Catalog with Tables of Contents

One of the many ways to meet the challenge of offering users a better search experience—and to continue the library\u27s existence as a “growing organism” (Ranganathan)—in the current information atmosphere is to provide more text to search against, just as Google\u27s Book Search does. One method for achieving this is to add tables of contents (TOC) and summary notes into a catalog\u27s bibliographic records for books, thereby offering additional, highly relevant search terms into a library\u27s database. While adding access points is not a new notion, libraries can start to meet users\u27 expectations by providing them with more information about the books included in library catalogs. This paper explains how the addition of tables of contents (and some summary notes) to a library consortium\u27s local catalog provided positive results, especially when weighed against the costs of incorporating them into the catalog