Hey Bernhard, where are you getting the names from? And can you
(legally/technically) re-distribute them in bulk form?
Jonathan
Bernhard Eversberg wrote:
> The recently released LC dataset of some 342,684 subject headings was
> now merged into our browser:
>
> http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/lcsh/
>
> Some 70.000 new terms have been added this way, making it a total of
> 6.6 million records. These include names, being far more numerous than
> topics.
> Improvements have been made in the handling of broader terms. Clicking
> on one brings up the display of the alphabetical listing under
> that term so you see what else there is in the vicinity.
>
> In my opinion, LC's own approach so far is lacking alphabetical
> browsing:
> http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/
> So, for a search you may easily get a message like
>
> Your search for "dorian grey" retrieved 0 results.
>
> where it would be of some help to display, instead, an alphabetically
> arranged listing that would show you what there is and what there isn't
> so you may detect your error:
>
> http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/lcsh/page.php?urG=LCS&urS=dorian+grey
>
> (Dorian Gray, as a ficitious character, is a topical heading, not a
> personal name one!)
> (For this case, Google asks no "Did you mean" question, although
> bringing up a mixture of both spellings, but very different hit counts.)
>
> Incidentally, I noticed that there's no entry for the "Goldberg
> Variations" in LCSH. That's because it has a Uniform title record
> under "Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. Goldberg-Variationen".
> These records are not in id.loc.gov either, nor in our browser,
> but as of yet only in
> http://authorities.loc.gov
>
> These details show that the topical headings alone do not by far include
> everything anyone would intuitively expect when doing subject searches.
> Rather, every authority record, whatever type, can be used as a subject
> access point.
>
>
> B.Eversberg
>
>
Received on Fri May 08 2009 - 10:42:17 EDT