Quite by accident I discovered the relationship between courses and their texts is hidden in many (approx. 2000) campus bookstore interfaces.
If you visit a physical campus bookstore you can browse courses for their textbooks. Very useful if you are interested the subject but not taking the course.
An online LLM (master’s of taxation) flyer prompted me to check the textbooks for the course work.
A simple enough information request. Find the campus bookstore and browse by course for text listings.
Not so fast!
The online presences of over 1200 campus bookstores are delivered http://www.bkstr.com/, which offers this interface:
Another 748 campus bookstores are delivered by http://bncollege.com/, with a similar interface for textbooks:
I started this post by saying the relationship between courses and their texts is hidden, but that’s not quite right.
The relationship between a meaningless course number and its required/suggested text is visible, but the identification of a course by a numeric string is hardly meaningful to the casual observer. (read not an enrolled student)
Perhaps better to say that a meaningful identification of courses for non-enrolled students and their relationship to required/suggested texts is absent.
That is the relationship of course -> text is present, but not in a form meaningful to anyone other than a student in that course.
Considering two separate vendors across almost 2,000 bookstores deliberately obscure the course -> text relationship, who has to wonder why?
I don’t have any immediate suggestions but when I encounter systematic obscuring of information across vendors, alarm bells start to go off.
Just for completeness sake, you can get around the obscuring of the course -> text relationship by searching for syllabus LLM taxation income OR estate OR corporate or (school name) syllabus LLM taxation income OR estate OR corporate. Extract required/suggested texts from posted syllabi.
PS: If you can offer advice on bookstore interfaces suggest enabling the browsing of courses by name and linking to the required/suggested texts.
During the searches I made writing this post, I encountered a syllabus on basic tax by Prof. Bret Wells which has this quote by Martin D. Ginsburg:
Basic tax, as everyone knows, is the only genuinely funny subject in law school.
Tax law does have an Alice in Wonderland quality about it, but The Hunting of the Snark: an Agony in Eight Fits is probably the closer match.