Ideally, one would want string matches only on attested forms. Especially with corporate bodies, which are subject to periodic reorganization, subordinate relationships proliferate rapidly. The English name of the parent body is useful if the subordinate body publishes in English from time to time, less so if it publishes only in German. A simple approach would be to keyword index parenthetical data in the 670 field, though this would introduce some extraneous non-name data into the index.
Ed
-----Original Message-----
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Karen Coyle
Sent: Friday, April 24, 2009 12:40 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Leveraging Authority Data in Keyword Searches
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
--
-----------------------------------
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
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Received on Fri Apr 24 2009 - 16:05:43 EDT