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Yes, I would think that anyone would want to be able to specify which is the last name, but  lately the “left anchored phrase” search seems to be buried deeper and deeper in public catalogs, if it is available at all.   Endeca also lacks a “title begins with” search.    Our classic catalog is no longer being supported and will eventually be retired, leaving the technical interface our last holdout of headings as we know them.   And we are part of a group of libraries developing a new open source “back end” (cf. http://kuali.org/ole) so who knows what the future will hold.    As I wrote in my original message, I would be very interested to hear about any basic research on user support for controlled headings, or any aspect of authority control.    Sometimes it seems that discussions on this and other cataloging lists are based on completely different assumptions than those behind user interfaces.
Amy


Amy H. Turner
Monographic Cataloger and Authority Control Coordinator
Duke University Libraries
Durham, NC

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From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Elizabeth O'Keefe
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Theses name headings and privacy concerns--tangent on display of headings

I tried the search for Michael Douglas that you recommended, and found it very frustrating. There appears to be no way to access a browsable list of authors whose last names begin with Douglas, and whose first name is Michael.  This would give me a chance to review the names and choose the most likely name, if there is more than one match. For this I had to go to the classic catalog. If I search phone directories on the Internet, I get to specify the last name, and then I get a list sorted by last name; wouldn't anybody searching by name want this as an option?

Liz O'Keefe


Elizabeth O'Keefe
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The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue
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>>> Amy Turner <[log in to unmask]> 10/27/2010 1:16 PM >>>
It seems that the trend in "next generation" catalogs is away from headings as we know them, in favor of the Googlesque approach of a long list of hits with no clear indication of the connection between the user's search and the responses.

For example, in Duke's catalog, if I enter the author "Douglas, Michael" I get 1,781 titles of which the first is a book by Griffin, Michael (Michael Douglas), 1949- followed by two books by Gose, Michael D. (Michael Douglas), 1946-, then one by Jesseph, Douglas Michael.   If I click on the facet for videos and DVDs, I'm down to 122 hits, many of whom include Douglas, Michael, 1944- as a heading, but to see this, I have to click through several screens. If I then click on the heading, the system searches for "Douglas, Michael, 1944-" which BEGINS to approximate a search for an controlled heading.   However, if the heading were "Smith, John" without dates, the retrieval set would not be for the unqualified heading, but for any heading with Smith and John in it.


If you want to try this yourself, the address of our catalog is:

http://find.library.duke.edu

Is anybody aware of any research on user appreciation of controlled headings?  I have proposed that we do such a study here, but don't know if we will have the time.

As far as how headings should be formulated and display, I think the Wikipedia approach is a good model:

Michael Douglas (disambiguation)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Douglas is an American actor.

Michael Douglas may also refer to:

Mike Douglas (1925-2006), stage name of Michael Delaney Dowd, Jr., an American talk show host
Michael Keaton (born 1951), actor whose birth name is Michael Douglas
Michael Crichton (1942-2008), used the pen name Michael Douglas
Michael R. Douglas, physicist prominent in string theory
Michael Dutton Douglas (1945-1963), killed in a car accident involving future First Lady Laura Bush
Michael Douglas (skeleton racer), Canadian skeleton racer
Michael Douglas (politician), from Dominica

Amy


Amy H. Turner
Monographic Cataloger and Authority Control Coordinator
Duke University Libraries
Durham, NC

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-----Original Message-----
From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mike Tribby
Sent: Wednesday, October 27, 2010 9:41 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Theses name headings and privacy concerns

I am indeed a slow learner at times, the moreso with anything regarding RDA, but I'm still wondering what the results display would look like in the environment Stephen Hearn describes. for the example of Michael Douglas, would the patron entering the search simply pull up a list of "Douglas, Michael" entries, undifferentiated until clicked on? Would some snippet of differentiating information appear in the list? If it's just a list of "Douglas, Michael" results with no further information on the results screen, how is that an improvement on what we have now? At least with birth and/or death dates a patron could make an educated guess for a film star like Douglas, but what if the search is on "Johnson, George"-- where one is searching on a very common name for a person who may well not be the son of Kirk Douglas or a cultural icon, but just an author (or director, or artist, or poet, or whatever) who is not yet widely known?

I don't deny that the information available in Stephen's scenario would be an improvement on our present bare bones approach, but how does this lead to a clearer display for patrons? Aside from occasional factual mistakes, one of the most consistent complaints I hear about IMDb's results displays are that they can be a jumble of undifferentiated names (other than the Roman numerals).

However, with mots like this: "detailed a far more seamier side of the Hollywood film industry"* it's a daily source of entertainment.


*from IMDb's bio of Kenneth Angerer.


Mike Tribby
Senior Cataloger
Quality Books Inc.
The Best of America's Independent Presses

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-----Original Message-----
From: Program for Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Stephen Hearn
Sent: Tuesday, October 26, 2010 4:09 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Theses name headings and privacy concerns

When I search "michael douglas" in IMDb, I get a list of identities for "Michael Douglas." They have the roman numeral designation, but more importantly, they also have information associating, say, a particular Michael Douglas with "stunts" for "Ski School". The point is that the roman numeral is just a neutral bit of differentiating data (in principle; not claiming that IMDb has done a great job of merging and differentiating persons). Once the differentiation is achieved, other facts can be called up and joined to the differentiated identity. The type of facts and the type of display could vary; it wouldn't have to follow the pattern in IMDb. That said, if I'm looking for a Michael Douglas who's credited as a stuntperson on the DVD I'm cataloging, the information IMDb provides is more useful to me than a list of birth dates would be. It's also more economical, since the facts about this Michael Douglas are already recorded in the data IMDb has for "Ski School," and don't need to be researched. A machine could come up with them, given the right underlying data structures.

I also like that all the "Michael Douglas" entries are pulled together in IMDb. In our catalog, any $c text gets alphabetized with all the middle names and initials for other Michael Douglases, making the task of browsing to find a particular Michael Douglas that much more arduous. If our indexes could collocate the $c cases, that would help, but I've given up on hoping for that. The better solution would be to make the name heading simple, make it always possible to differentiate one heading from another, and work on deriving the additional identifying information associated with the identified name for the list display. That wouldn't solve all our problems. There will always be ambiguous cases and the potential for human error. But it would be a big step forward in terms of our ability to differentiate entities and convey useful information about them.

Stephen