Dragon, Patricia M wrote:

> This discussion of browse vs. keyword has been valuable to me in thinking of
> a response to a question I received a while ago from a faculty member.  He
> wanted to use the online catalog to find books by Petrarch, so he did an
> author keyword search for "Petrarch".  Seems like a reasonable approach.
> But he didn't know that the authorized form of Petrarch's name is Francesco
> Petrarca (why would he?).  So in his author keyword search he only got a
> couple of items by the Petrarch Society, etc., with no indication of what he
> did wrong.
>
> 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?

The only technique I've seen entails copying references into 9XX tags of
the bib record -- yes, *every* bib record that carries the heading gets
the references ---- and mapping those tags for author keyword.

Of course, the system has to support maintaining those tags every time
the authority is changed.

Hal Cain
Joint Theological Library
Parkville, Victoria, Australia
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