Cross-references: what good are they?

Authority work has been one of my long-time pet projects. Authority records, properly linked to headings in bibliographic records, make it much, much easier to globally update headings as changes occur. Authority records can help keep headings in bibliographic records consistent, and consistent headings allow users to search those headings in the catalog and get what they're looking for. Even if users don't know a thing about name and subject headings and just use keyword searches, hyperlinked consistent headings allow users to click on the headings and retrieve everything else that has that same heading (depending on system settings - and, actually, I'm not quite sure what our setting are like). It's very important that the headings are consistent, because, if they aren't, clicking on the link isn't necessarily going to bring everything up. The OPAC doesn't know that the hyperlink "Tiger" and the previous authorized form "Tigers" should be considered the same thing.

There's one thing about authorities that bothers me, though. When I was in library school, one of the touted benefits of using authority records was their cross-references. If a user doesn't know that the authorized form used by their library happens to be "Airships" and not "Blimps," the cross-references are supposed to help them find the records they're looking for anyway.  The problem is that this assumes that users are doing browse searches. Anecdotal evidence (and quite possibly actual studies, which I haven't tried looking up) says that this isn't true. Instead, users, including a lot of librarians, are probably using keyword searches. True, they may be subject keyword or author keyword searches, but they're still keyword searches and, as far as I know, there is no ILS out there that searches cross-references in authority records in addition to text within bibliographic records. I had heard that SirsiDynix Symphony does somewhat, but, from what I can tell, "somewhat" means that, if the keyword search retrieves nothing, users are redirected to a browse search for that word. That can work well enough in some cases. If users don't automatically assume that the redirection is a completely failed search and actually click on the cross-reference hyperlink. And only if the keyword search retrieves absolutely nothing.

It would be nice if the cross-references of any authority record to which headings in a bibliographic record are linked were searched in subject/author/genre keyword searches (maybe even general keyword searches). If an ILS exists that can do this, I'd love to hear about it. And I'd like to know why more don't.

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.

Pages and pages of names

For a while there, I had been working on batch loads of authority files for names in our 100 fields that WorkFlows said were unauthorized (which still leaves the 600s and 700s, and maybe 800s). I sort of stopped working on that project for a while - I think that I was working on the C's when I stopped. I thought I'd done a pretty thorough job, and then I started working on the project again. From A to C, I was able to batch load more than 2500 authority records. I think a lot of them came from e-resource records, which means every time we get batches of e-book records added to the system, the number of unauthorized headings I have to deal with just balloons. Really, I already knew that, I had just never had it demonstrated to me quite so clearly before. Oh, free MARC records. Even the best of them bloat my catalog maintenance reports.

I'll keep plugging along. Going through all the names to find the ones that shouldn't be batch loaded is annoying, though, like a word search puzzle that never ends. Luckily, I may be getting a little help with that. We'll see.

I've got my procedures for name headings pretty much figured out, but I need to take another look at the way I've been doing subject headings. Hmm.... On the plus side, I'm getting really good at doing nifty things with Find and Replace in Word.

Authority control, without the shoulder pain

For most people at DSL, the biggest benefit of all those unsmooshed fields we now have in our catalog is that subject and name headings can now be used properly. For me, the biggest benefit is that I can now run reports that will allow me to do some of our authority work in batches. The process still takes time, and there are so very many headings that will need to be dealt with individually, but being able to do any of this in batch makes me happy. Yesterday, I started writing up procedures for how the reports need to be run and massaged so that batch searching with them is possible, but I've already loaded 10,000 or so authority records with the help of this method, so I know it works.

By the way, prior to our unsmooshing project, those 10,000 authority records would have probably taken me more than 4 months to go through and load, assuming that the resulting shoulder pain from moving my hand back and forth between my mouse and keyboard for each record didn't completely cripple me. I ♥ batch searching.

LCSH for "Cookery" being changed to "Cooking"

The change hasn't happened yet, but apparently a lot of cooking and cookbook subject headings will be changed in the near future or are still being considered for change: see the PDF on this.

The problem, as far as our local catalog goes, is that I am still performing all authority work manually. I could potentially make cooking and cookbook subject headings a special project for myself, but it would only be one of many special projects I've currently got going. Even if I made it a special project and, by hand, exported former "cookery" subject headings from OCLC and imported them into WorkFlows, there's still no guarantee I'd get everything (I'm still finding headings using the older "Vietnam Conflict", and I'm sure we've got more with "European War" instead of "World War", etc.). Plus, we have an unknown number of records with headings that, for some reason, aren't properly linked to their corresponding authority records - these would need to be "flipped" by hand.

This isn't really just a cookery/cooking problem - it's a general, "doing authority work completely by hand" problem. At this point, the best I can do is load new authority records, overlay any that have changed when a new bibliographic record brings those changes to my attention, and load records for unauthorized headings when I have time. I'd love to be able to go through the Library of Congress Weekly Lists and update an of our authority records that have been changed (or split, or merged, or deleted), but, at this point, that's just a nice dream.

Oh, and since this post deals with authority records, I'll just mention that from the beginning of June to today, the end of September, I've loaded 4,102 new authority records. We have a total of 243,981 authority records, period. Of these, 27,811 are provisional (in our system, that means that they're machine-generated and therefore contain nothing beyond the "authorized" form of the name or subject heading and the title of the work that was used to generate the record). A couple hundred thousand authority records may sound like a lot, but we still need many more. I'm working on it. I'm also working on overlaying as many of those provisional authority records as I can.

Ah, authority work, my eternal project...