Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>Rinne, Nathan (ESC) wrote:
>> *most demanding user.* To the third, that very long list at the end of
>> my email were official "NT" terms from LOC's general website, accessible
>> to all.
>Are you sure? I'm having trouble figuring out how to get LCSH "NT/BT"
>relationships from the loc website. Which website, authorities.loc.gov?
>Please explain further. I'd be interested in getting access to NT/BT
>information if there's a way to. All I could find, is I could lookup the
>heading "Linguistics" in "authorities", and then click on it--but to me,
>it looks like what it gives me is then any 6xx field found in the LC
>corupus that has the keyword "Linguistics" in it. Could be
>"Linguistics--" subdivisons (but without the '--' displaying for some
>reason; subdivisions are different than NT/BT relationships in LCSH),
>could be other terms that include the word 'linguistics' in them, etc.
At the risk of stepping on Nathan's toes, I'll jump in here...
You can see the list in either LC's Authorities site (subject search on
"Linguistics," then hit the big red button next to the term) and on their
Catalog site (subject browse search on "Linguistics," then hit the More
Info button). The list contains headings, not subdivisions. And the dash
only appears in the individual bib record displays, sadly.
The thing about LC's catalog is that it's rather clunky for for determining
NTs and BTs. Narrower headings are given when one takes the route I laid
out above; broader terms, however, can only be determined when looking at
the *authority* record itself, whether in the MARC display (see, for
instance, the 550 field in "Analogy (Linguistics)," where the $w g means
that "Linguistics" is the broader term (see:
<http://www.loc.gov/marc/authority/ecadtref.html>)) or in the HTML
("Labeled") display of the same record, where the broader term is prefixed
with the awfully generic label "Search Also Under:".
The thing about LC's manifestation of MARC authority records--and here I
may be wrong insofar as my experience with such records is limited--is that
the MARC code within any one record will only point upward (broader terms,
as in the "Analogy (Linguistics)" example above), but not downward. In the
latter case, LC's system recognizes what authority records are "pointing
at" a particular heading, and can then provide a linkage as displayed in
the list Nathan gives. Oddly, this same system does not (or can not)
provide the same answers for broader terms, even though that information is
right there in the record (as I mentioned in the last sentence in the
paragraph above). There are, however, mechanisms in the MARC authority
format that can provide an explicitly list of narrower as well as broader
terms in any one record, if such a process were to be undertaken. And there
may be other ways of presenting relationship information to OPAC users by
way of manipulating the OPAC software itself.
--
Mark K. Ehlert
University of Minnesota Libraries
Received on Sat Jun 09 2007 - 14:16:10 EDT