Ross Singer wrote:
> Jim, you completely missed my point.
I understood your point, I'm just saying that the sparse number of references wouldn't have solved Tim's problem since the terms "Nat Turner's Rebellion" (which is how lots of people think of it) would not be found since there is no term "rebellion" in the authority record. So, we could do that and then someone would want "Uprising," so we would add that and someone would want "Revolt" ..... Multiply this hundreds of thousands of times and we would have people jumping out the windows of their offices.
The idea of adding variants to "solve the problem" would take all of our time and be futile.
While I am all for adding lots more cross-references, we can no longer look at things in such a piece-meal approach which demands massive amounts of our time. The only possibility to do something in this way would be to open it up to a "wiki" approach, and I fear that this would lead to sheer chaos, or again, to a huge amount of our time spent sorting things out.
Besides, this sidesteps the bigger problem of "subject arrays" as I mentioned in one of my open replies to Thomas Mann. I remember I had an example of "the reference interview" which becomes a subject array of something like "Reference services (Libraries)" and "Interviewing." There are probably more of these sorts of subject arrays that lack see references than the example of Nat Turner, and in my opinion, it is far more important to help people navigate these subject arrays
I think there are a lot of possibilities for machine searching, data mining, sorting, and displaying that may come about now that LC has let out the authority file for development.
Jim Weinheimer
Received on Tue May 05 2009 - 10:44:31 EDT