Cue up the 13th Floor Elevators – “You’re gonna miss me
… you didn’t realize … ”
--GW
From: Program for
Cooperative Cataloging [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Amy
Turner
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 8:16 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [PCCLIST] Theses name headings and privacy concerns--tangent
on display of headings
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
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
Director of Collection Information Systems
The Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016-3405
TEL: 212 590-0380
FAX: 212-768-5680
NET: [log in to unmask]
Visit CORSAIR, the
Library’s comprehensive collections catalog, now on
the web at
http://corsair.themorgan.org
>>> 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
[log in to unmask]
-----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
mailto:[log in to unmask]
-----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