May I suggest there is something Orwellian about the phrase "did you
mean?" when applied to politically-charged terms? It suggests to me
not merely that resources can be found under a given heading, but that
the searcher's own term is invalid and wrong.
Many may feel comfortable delegitimizing "partial birth abortion" and
"socialized medicine" but—to take a few examples from Sanford
Berman—UFL still has two items with the LCSH "Yellow peril." 137 under
"Jewish Question" and 2 under "Catholics as Scientists."
So far, I haven't been able to make the catalog suggest I'm after
information on the Yellow Peril, though, and indeed when I search for
the phrase, it suggests I mean "Walleye (Fish)." Are you mining your
own subject headings or doing it against a list of currently-approved
ones?
Tim
On Fri, May 1, 2009 at 5:52 PM, Simpson,Elizabeth Yager
<betsys_at_uflib.ufl.edu> wrote:
> The State University Libraries of Florida are using an Endeca catalog - http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp . Recently, we implemented a "Did you mean ... " link for title, author and subject keyword searches. The system searches the user's term in the authority tables and if there's a cross-ref match, it displays a "Did you mean ... " for the authorized term. Instead of populating the user's search results with hits based on the authorized term, the system allows the user to click and do a new search if desired.
Received on Mon May 04 2009 - 02:29:27 EDT