On Wed, 2004-03-31 at 08:50, Dragon, Patricia M wrote:

> Has anyone come up with a way for cross-references on authority records to
> be useful in a keyword search?  What would be really, useful, I suppose, is
> for the system to recognize that Petrarch was a 400 on the authority record
> for Petrarca, and say on the results screen "Did you mean Petrarca,
> Francesco, 1304-1374?"  But is that still a pipe dream for now?  Is user
> education the only answer here?

There are systems that add the keywords from the 4xx of the authority
record to the keyword index for authority-controlled terms. That's not
as good as what you are wishing for, however. The user retrieves the
"Petrarch" records but sees "Petrarca" in the results, not Petrarch. A
knowledgeable user says: "Oh, that's the form of the name they're using
in this catalog." A less knowledgeable user says: "Hey, how come I got
these records? This isn't what I asked for!" So the results are there,
but the user is still confused.

This all comes down to file design, really. And file design tends to
come down to the question of the efficiency of computing. You've
described a perfectly good solution in a short paragraph, but making it
work in a system is devilishly hard.
--
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Karen Coyle
Digital Library Specialist
http://www.kcoyle.net
Ph: 510-540-7596 Fax: 510-848-3913
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