Friday, July 2, 2010

Cookery, again

I think I managed to change all our "cookery" authority records to their new "cooking" form. That means that, tonight, all subject headings linked to those records should change to "cooking" instead of "cookery."

This does not necessarily mean that all instances of "cookery" in our subject headings will be gone. Our Children's subject headings will probably continue to use "cookery" - since I only do authority work on Library of Congress subject headings and not Children's, MeSH, or anything else, the only subject headings that ever get updated are Library of Congress subject headings. Also, we have some Library of Congress subject headings in our catalog that don't have their corresponding subject authority records loaded yet - these won't change to "cooking" until I change them by hand and/or load their authority records and force the headings to flip.

4 comments:

  1. If one did a subject search on cook* (or whatever the wildcard symbol is for our catalog - I have forgotten), would that pull up cookery and cooking?

    LIKE the new blog look - much more readable for this old fogey.

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  2. Yes, it would. The only real problem not having everything switched over would cause is inconsistencies and incompleteness in subject browse searching (which I doubt anyone does much) and with subject hyperlink clicking (which, when I'm searching the catalog as a regular user, is something I do, although I don't know how much others do it too).

    Once everything really is switched over, if you want recipes you can find them by searching "cooking" as a subject.

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  3. Ok, I just checked, and I was right - the Children's subject headings didn't switch over. I think all the regular LCSH changed, though - it's hard to tell if all those 70 titles that come up under "cookery" are there because of Children's headings.

    It's one of the drawbacks of having mixed subject headings in a system that can only really handle one kind of subject heading at a time.

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  4. I will no longer be able to amaze people when they can't find receipes and was able too because I knew the secret LC term. If you need/want me to manually change the headings let me know.

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