I too have been thinking about how to incorporate "see also" type
references from our rich bibliographic records into our search
functions. In addition to "did you mean", it's possible that in
some/many cases, the search should be _automatically_ expanded. For
instance, from Eric's examples, in some cases when the user enters
"Jive" in a keyword search, should the search be automatically expanded
to include "OR subject: Blues (Music)"? I think maybe so. Somehow the
user should probably be notified somewhere on screen that this happened,
however. And have the option to _disable_ it. A facetted interface
probably helps here--or maybe vice versa, it's me assuming a facetted
interface that led me to think about this.
More food for thought.
These kind of "used for" references (a non-preferred 'lead in' term that
points to a preferred index term) occur not only from LCSH authority
records, and in some cases from personal/corporate name authority
records, but perhaps also in other places in our records. For instance,
most of our systems incorporate serial preceeding/succeeding titles _as_
legitimate titles in the (browse) title index for the record that does
NOT have those titles. This often is confusing to the user. But there
might be some way to treat those preceeding/succeeding titles as
non-preferred lead-ins in a keyword search that would be less confusing,
especially if you could turn it off.
Jonathan
Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
> If any number of word tools (dictionaries, thesauri, gazetteers,
> authority lists, encyclopedias, etc.) were at your disposal, then how
> would you employ them in the implementation of a "next generation"
> library catalog?
>
> As you know, the data for many of these word tools are freely
> available on the 'Net. True, much of the content is dated, but that
> does not make it 100% useless, just less useful as it could be.
> Moreover, some of this data is formatted in such a way that it can be
> retrieved programatically. One example is through the DICT protocol. [1]
>
> If you had programatic access to this word tool data, then how would
> you incorporate it into your library "catalog"? If I had such data I
> would use the dictionary function to confirm what I was looking for
> was what I had searched. I would use a thesaurus to suggest other
> search terms. I would use an authority list to provide See Also and
> See From references. I would use an encyclopedia to get an overview
> of the topic and then move on to the cited books and articles.
>
> For a good time, I toyed with this idea ever so briefly. I first
> installed a DICT server, downloaded subject authorities from FRED
> [2], and created a simple "dictionary" whose words were authority
> terms and "definitions" where the See From and See Also references.
> You folks who use Linux may be able to try this:
>
> dict -h 208.81.177.118 -d subjects -s substring blues
>
> Which returns something like this:
>
> From Subject authority list [subjects]:
>
> Blues festivals
> See from: Blues music festivals
> See also: Music festivals
>
> Blues (Fictitious character)
> See from: Blues le chat (Fictitious character)
>
> Blues (Music)
> See from: Blues (Music)--United States
> See from: Blues (Songs, etc.)
> See from: Jive (Music)
> See also: African Americans--Music
> See also: Folk music--United States
> See also: Popular music
> See also: Rhythm and blues music
> See also: Washboard band music
>
> This looks to me like an additional Did You Mean implementation. Food
> for thought on a Monday.
>
> [1] http://www.dict.org/
> [2] http://www.ibiblio.org/fred2.0/authorities/
>
> --
> Eric Lease Morgan
> University Libraries of Notre Dame
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Digital Services Software Engineer
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Mon Mar 31 2008 - 09:42:25 EDT