Yeah, and Ed Jones helpfully educated me that there isn't even reliably
a potential string match. Mis-memories from my library school cataloging
classes led me astray.
What a mess. It is very depressing that we spend so much collective
money maintaining these authority files in a way that isn't close to as
useful as they could be -- and it wouldn't really be hardly any more
expensive to get a huge gain in usefulness.
Karen Coyle wrote:
> Jonathan Rochkind wrote:
>
>> But the departmental authority records are _linked_ to the parent
>> authority record, right?
>>
>
> No. Not unless you consider a potential string match to be a link.
> That's all you've got. And if you don't have them all in your system,
> you could be missing some intervening departments that would make that
> string match work.
>
>
>> Ed Jones wrote:
>>
>>> Unfortunately, authority records aren't currently designed to support
>>> keyword searching. They were designed in a world of card catalogs,
>>> which could only be approached via browsing, so their designed
>>> hierarchically. Consequently, a keyword search such as "university
>>> munich mathematics" (which works beautifully in Google) fails utterly
>>> in library catalogs because "university of munich" occurs only in a
>>> reference on the authority record for "Universität München", not in
>>> references on any of the authority records for its academic departments.
>>>
>
> Couldn't we fix this? Using the string match possibility that we have
> (which will fail in some cases), couldn't we proliferate the x-refs to
> all of the related records? (Not in individual systems -- I mean in the
> distributed authority records.) True, the records could get much longer
> if we reproduce all of the necessary combinations of corporate hierarchy
> and variant terms, but I can't think of anything else that will make
> keyword searching on those fields work.
>
> Then again, perhaps the whole idea of 'cascading' hierarchies in
> corporate names should be re-thought for the keyword search environment.
> They're obviously designed to be used in a linear catalog. Maybe
> something else completely different makes better sense today.
>
> kc
>
>
Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 15:54:57 EDT