 |
 |
Here's an interesting real example of how relying on just keywords for series without a series authority record loaded into a catalog is not going to work well. The Wildlife Conservation Society publishes a monographic series that has been established as WCS Working Paper. On the analytical title page of the individual monographs, the series title appears variously as WCS Working Paper or Working Paper. Some issues have a series title page that says WCS Working Paper Series. And many issues have the title WCS Working Papers on a publisher's listing of all the issues or on the analytical t.p. verso. In our OPAC, a keyword search of a string of words first searches for that string together. If nothing is found, the system will execute a boolean "and" search of each word. A user doing a keyword search on the title WCS Working Papers retrieves absolutely nothing, because that variant is never found on a source used for transcription of the series statement. On the other hand, if the user did a title browse search of that variant, they would get a referral to the controlled form of the title used as the series added entry, WCS Working Paper (the only difference is the singular/plural form of Paper(s)) because a series authority was created documenting all the variants and was loaded into our OPAC. For monographic series that are cataloged as separates (i.e. classed separately), our current policy is that we do not create a public series/serial record in our OPAC. We rely on the series added entries to collocate the series. If we stopped tracing controlled series access points and producing series authority records, I wonder if we might need to start creating serial records for these resources, since only there would one find all the variant titles for the series traced in that bibliographic record, which would provide the keyword and variant title access that could get people to some resources. My main point is that keyword access in our (and other) OPACs will only work when the user searches on keywords present in a bibliographic record. We need both keyword and controlled access through the presence of series authorities to get users to some resources. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Adam L. Schiff Principal Cataloger University of Washington Libraries Box 352900 Seattle, WA 98195-2900 (206) 543-8409 (206) 685-8782 fax [log in to unmask] http://faculty.washington.edu/~aschiff ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~