On Wed, 4 Apr 2012, Kevin M Randall wrote:

> John Marr wrote:
>
>>   4. Are we (and should we be) in the business of controlling headings or
>> supplying hotlinks?
>
> Are you asking whether *either* of those is our business, or whether 
> it's one vs. the other?  I certainly hope you mean the latter, because I 
> can't wrap my head around the idea that controlling headings is 
> something that shouldn't be done.

  We're definitely in the business of controlling headings, but the business 
of creating "biographical" authority records has always been proscribed 
as being beyond the intent of authority records.

> It should be both.  With current technology, hotlinks should be an 
> integral part of the metadata, either directly (in the record) or 
> indirectly through various software routines that make up the user 
> interface.

  That is your opinion. Because I am used to using the Web in authority 
work and find it easy to do, or because as a patron I would find such 
hotlinks annoying and aside from what I'm searching, I'd prefer to leave 
it up to the patrons to do Web searches. Our job is to make in-house 
information accessible.

>  In this day and age, the user has every reason to expect that a name 
> heading in an OPAC display should function as a link to other resources 
> related to that name.

  Again, that's your opinion. I'd say they have every reason not to expect 
it, because that's not what they are looking for when the come into a 
library. Until a mass of patrons demand the "service", I'd let them do 
their own Web searches. They've got to be incredibly less useful to 
patrons than simply locating local resources.

  Not to mention the headache keeping those hotlinks current would be.

Cheers!

jgm

  John G. Marr
  Cataloger
  CDS, UL
  Univ. of New Mexico
  Albuquerque, NM 87131
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