Re: Leveraging Authority Data in Keyword Searches

From: Karen Coyle <lists_at_nyob>
Date: Fri, 24 Apr 2009 12:24:46 -0700
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Jacobs, Jane W wrote:
>
> Basic Keyword search in Bibliographic records +
>
>  
>
> Keyword search in Type z (authority) records fields 1XX & 4XX -> 
>
> if a hit occurs grab the 1XX and perform appropriate keyword search
> (i.e. author keyword, title keyword, etc.) on it and add to result set.
>
>   


We had something like this in the MELVYL system of years ago although we 
added the keywords from the authority 4xx fields to the keyword index 
for the name in the 1xx. It was fairly simple from a systems point of 
view, but led to some oddities in search, in  particular due to 
unexpected combinations. The worst was the one we called 'the haunting 
of Lauran Paine.' This wouldn't be so bad today since the 4xx's in that 
authority record have been changed to 5xx's under AACR2 (so, see, it did 
accomplish something good). Paine has written under about 50 different 
pseudonyms, each chosen to meet the genre of the work. So there is 
everything from Antoinette Duchesne and Arthur St. George (period 
romances, I presume) to Hunter Liggett and Buck Thompson (the cowboy 
books). Pretty much no matter what name you searched on (Hunter S. 
Thompson, Angela Davis, to name a few) pulled up all of the works of 
Lauran Paine. So my advice is that it would be better to find a way to 
index each name separately to minimize the false hits.

The hardest part is that users don't see the switch happen -- they don't 
know why records are being retrieved that don't have their keywords in 
them anywhere. I imagine that many users don't pay attention to this, 
but it is confusing.

kc

-- 
-----------------------------------
Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
ph.: 510-540-7596   skype: kcoylenet
fx.: 510-848-3913
mo.: 510-435-8234
------------------------------------
Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 15:27:12 EDT