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John Marr wrote:

>   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.

I wasn't aware that we were talking about biographical authority records.  I thought we were talking about unique vs. nonunique headings and the ability to have unambiguous links.

> > 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.

Making the information accessible is the whole point of the hotlinks.  The user can click on the heading instead of having to go to a search box and type out the text string.  And we aren't talking about "Web searches" here, we're talking about links between bibliographic metadata.

> >  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.

It's clear now we're talking about very different things.  Unless I'm mistaken, the discussion here has been about linking a heading for John Smith (1) to all of the resources related to that person, John Smith (2) to all of the headings related to that other person, etc.  It's not about linking the headings in the library catalog to internet resources in the "outside" world.  (Although, with linked data I hope that will eventually happen...)

Kevin M. Randall
Principal Serials Cataloger
Bibliographic Services Dept.
Northwestern University Library
1970 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL  60208-2300
email: [log in to unmask]
phone: (847) 491-2939
fax:   (847) 491-4345