Ted,
You said it before I could. In the example I offered, I had partially
decomposed the subjects (I was calling those "subjkey" but gave up
and now just call them "subject").
In answer to Kristin's point, clicking the "educational sociology"
facet in that search will bring up all items that have that phrase
somewhere in their subject headings. So it not only finds the record
with this LCSH:
Educational sociology — Europe — Congresses
...but (with a different search) it can bubble up terms that usually
appear near the end of the LCSH, like "study and teaching".
A huge problem with this method is that it doesn't handle subjects
like "Cookery, Indic" or "Art, Indic" or "Study And Teaching
(Elementary)" well. Those phrases aren't broken up by subfield
indicators in the record, so they get indexed whole.
Fixing it (within the confines of my own systems), however, is pretty
common sense and nobody's really argued with me when I suggest it.
But your real point is that we need find a way to group results into
more generalized categories. That's where I admit my limits as a
programmer and step back.
Note about the software: It's Scriblio (formerly WPopac). More info
at the links below.
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/12/unsucking-the-opac-one-
mans-noble-efforts.html
http://www.techsource.ala.org/blog/2006/01/library-20-in-the-real-
world.html
--Casey
On May 9, 2007, at 1:23 PM, Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> I think traditionally,
> "faceted subjects" meant subjects that have been "decomposed" into
> separate logical elements that are extremely general, so that it's
> easy
> to move from one combination of the elements to another. I suppose
> maybe
> the "decomposition" is present on Lamson's Endeca-type page with the
> distinction between subjkey, author, format, and Meta. But the
> subjects
> themselves in subjkey are not faceted in that traditional sense.
On May 8, 2007, at 5:30 PM, Kristin Antelman wrote:
> Your example, sociology of education, demonstrates the problem. In
> our
> catalog, a keyword search on that term gives 861 hits, and the facet
> linking to the correct term, educational sociology, has 388 hits. If
> you look in our LCSH browse index, however, you will find 618 items
> with
> the heading "educational sociology" and its associated 81 subheadings.
> So the keyword searcher is not seeing 230 items with the exact heading
> they were searching for.
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/
ph: 603-535-2256
Received on Wed May 09 2007 - 12:02:13 EDT