[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Authority control enhancements in the works

[Dan Scott]

On Fri, 2010-06-25 at 10:48 -0400, Duimovich, George wrote:
> Hello Dan & IISH,
> 
> This is fantastic news. I've asked our cat's some feedback.
> 
> I haven't given it much thought on any specifics but wonder:
> - what functionality can be exposed to support libraries working in a multi-lingual authority control environment

Much thought would be helpful here. A cursory scan of recent work done
on multilingual authority control didn't turn up much material with
concrete implementation suggestions, although my retired colleague Ron
Slater's paper (Slater, Ron. "Authority Control in a Bilingual OPAC:
MultiLIS at Laurentian". Library Resources and Technical Services, v35
n4 p422-58 Oct 1991) has some relevant suggestions; I'm going to try to
get a version of that paper into our repository real soon now.

If a given bib record has a controlled heading, and the authority record
for that heading defines a reciprocal in another language, then we
_could_ update the bib to include that reciprocal heading as well -
which would automatically ensure that the bib could be retrieved under
either the term in either language (e.g. "Plato" or "Platon"). But that
seems like an abuse of the bibliographic record when it is the linked
authority record that should be doing the work.

So we could have leave the bib record itself untouched when reciprocals
in other languages are defined for one of its headings in the linked
authority record, but teach the ingest routines to automatically
populate the corresponding indexes with the reciprocals for that
heading. That seems a bit cleaner.

But before jumping into implementation details, I suppose we should talk
about this at two levels: what behaviour do we want end-users (OPAC
users, creators/maintainers of a complete set of authority data as IISH
will be, and cataloguers in more typical libraries, I guess?) to
experience in the context of multilingual authority control; and then we
need to figure out how to make that happen.

Apart from just the multilingual angle, some of this may help also
figure out what we do with second indicator, $0, $2, $5, $6, and $8 to
assist with filtering searches for authority records (if, say, in a
consortial system a given library wants to only use MeSH instead of LCSH
+ MeSH in browse interfaces / general bib searches).

What I would really like to see to help flesh this out is proposals with
sample bibliographic and authority records, the transformations that
need to happen to each when they're brought into Evergreen, and the
corresponding effects that the presence or absence of those authority
records would have on the searcher / cataloguer.

> - what building blocks can begin to be put in place to set us up for the semweb experience (as web services eventually start popping up like: http://id.loc.gov/authorities etc.).

There are at least two facets here:
  * Exposing Evergreen authority records (and other kinds of records) as
linked data that can participate in the data-linking frenzy that is
sweeping the globe
  * How to best integrate services like http://id.loc.gov/ into
Evergreen to supplement a cataloguer's workflow

I think these are interesting areas to explore, for sure, and if people
have concrete proposals for doing something with them, that would be
helpful. I'm not sure that they're areas that IISH wants to flesh out
right away, though; I guess I'll 

> Don't know if it would be helpful or is already familiar, but IFLA has this document on functional requirements for subject authorities: http://www.ifla.org/node/1297.

Hmm. Skimmed the 38 pages of the conceptual framework and while the
philosopher in me is interested in the ontology, I'm not sure how much
there is that is actually going to help us accomplish something
concrete. At the risk of sounding dismissive - Find, Identify, Select,
Explore... nomens and themas... okay, they've provided a more explicit
conceptual framework for something that I think many of us had
implicitly grasped. What does that translate into in the short term
two-week implementation time frame I'm talking about, or even into a
longer term time frame?