Ted P Gemberling schrieb:
>
> One tricky thing about authority work is that sometimes you don't know
> for quite awhile what the bibliographical identities are. Sometimes you
> have to look at lists of works published by people with identical names
> and try to find patterns.
And this means we need alphabetical browsing indexes as part of catalog
interfaces. I mean a phonebook-like index of the names in which you
can go up and down and see all the spellings that occur in all the
records of the system. It is not enough to show an alphabetical
arrangement of all those names that somehow match a name that you input,
because your input may be faulty. This way you also miss spelling errors
in the data, for example.
We also need title string indexes for browsing, as well as subject
headings and others. That many existing systems don't have anything
remotely like a browsing index is a curious fact.
IOW, the hit-and-miss concept of the single-slot searching interface is
not enough for catalogs.
B. Eversberg
Received on Wed May 16 2007 - 00:21:11 EDT