Ross Singer wrote:
> No, he's saying we have an authority record which knows all of the
> terms for Nat Turner's Rebellion.
>
> Why should the user know or care what the LCSH preferred term is? The
> records should be indiscriminate because they are referring to an
> authority.
>
> What Tim is saying is that if the search is restricted to what appears
> in the 650 tag then we have have completely forgone the advantages of
> moving it from an index card to a computer.
"An authority record which knows *all of the terms* for Nat Turner's Rebellion."
Wow! That would be one h*** of a record! How many languages would we limit it to? And besides, I'm sure there were lots of contemporary ways of relating to his rebellion that we would think are not very nice at all!
It seems that making that kind of an authority record would be absolutely impossible and only an exercise in futility.
While I agree that the idea of a "preferred term" has definite problems, the underlying function of the heading: to collocate variant forms, still holds. Choosing a single display (preferred form) for the headings is the problem, however, but I suspect it may be as simple as allowing all "4xx See" references to display equally with the heading, and have a display (as I have mentioned somewhere) such as Thomas Hyde had in his catalog of the Bodleian Library back in the 1500s or 1600s, which showed all variants simultaneously with the inclusion of "seu" (or).
"Abelard, Peter, seu, Abelardus, Petrus, [followed by the others]".
Today, we could allow the users to decide which each wants. (I have a suspicion nobody will care that much)
Now that the authority file is being made available for experimentation, I hope someone tries something like this.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue May 05 2009 - 09:58:28 EDT