[Koha-devel] Subject tracings

[Nicole Engard]

2011/2/23 Jared Camins-Esakov <jcamins at cpbibliography.com>

> Hello.
>
> Can anyone think of any reason not to specify that subject tracings should
> match only complete subfields? For example, at the moment, if you are
> looking at a book about Religions (with a subject term "Religions") in the
> catalog of a library that does not use Koha's authority control, when you
> click on the subject tracing in the OPAC, you will be given a result set
> that contains every single record that has the word "Religions" anywhere in
> its subject. Including, for example, books with the subject "Christianity
> and other religions."
>

I was doing a training a few months ago and the librarians there loved the
fact that it didn't do an exact match.  The reasoning made sense to me (but
then again I was never a stickler for the rules when I was cataloging).  If
you have a book with about the United States and a book that takes place in
the United States the subject term "United States" will appear in different
spots (with other possible identifiers). The way it searches now allows you
to find all of those subjects.  Other examples include keywords like
'Juvenile' or 'Fiction' (just to name a few).  I like that the search chains
the subjects together as keyword searches (on the subject) because then you
get more than if you were limited only to that exact subject.

Further, if your library isn't using Authorities then it makes perfect sense
that the search be flexible as it is now because there is no telling how two
people cataloged two books on the same topics.

>
> If we make the query on the subject tracings su,complete-subfield: the only
> false positives will be items where the subject heading being searched is
> used for both a main entry and a subdivision, which still seems like a
> significant improvement over the current behavior. Thoughts?
>

This might need to be an authorities system preference that asks outright if
the library uses authority control - and if so then you can make the search
only search the full authority - otherwise I'd say it should stay the way it
is.

Thanks
Nicole
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