[Koha-devel] Authority control - request for comments

[Jared Camins-Esakov]

Ian,

About point 13, adding a "Did you mean?" feature... this should be done in
> a way that applies to Biblios, as well, as it has often been requested in
> that context, and as we see with points 5 and 6, the mechanisms under
> Authorities are very similar to those under Biblios.
>

Drawing "Did you mean?" suggestions from the bibliographic database would
actually be a completely different animal from drawing the suggestions from
authorities. It would require a completely new set of dependencies along
with the ability to extract co-occurrence information and generate
suggestions from them. By using authorities for "Did you mean?" all we have
to do is search authorities, and suggest related terms. Note that the
related terms suggestions will be appearing in the bib searches.

I believe a 15th point is required:  fixing Authority Types.  Right now,
> they are essentially hardcoded, looking at the presence of specific MARC
> field numbers, and determining their Auth Type from that (during import, at
> least).  This means that newly created Authority Types wouldn't be
> accessible unless:
>
>    1. They used a completely new Main Entry MARC field number
>    2. The code was edited to associate that field number with that Auth
>    Type
>
> One prime example:  right now, LCSH and MeSH subject headings are both of
> the Topical Term Auth Type.  They have the same MARC structure, but belong
> to different thesauri.  As it stands, there is no easy way of
> differentiating a heading from one thesaurus from that of another.
>
> This may be out of scope for the work you're currently planning to do, but
> I'd ask you to keep it in mind all the same, and do any development with an
> eye towards making Authority Types more robustly supported.
>
Yes, I've thought about this. That's part of the reason for my proposal to
use an object-oriented Koha::Record::Authority class, which allows us to be
more flexible with our understanding of authorities and authority types.
(follow-up note to clarify the relationship between Koha::Record::Authority
and the MVC divisions discussed at the hackfest: Koha::Record::Authority
would be equivalent to Koha::BusinessLogic::Authority)

Regards,
Jared

-- 
Jared Camins-Esakov
Bibliographer, C & P Bibliography Services, LLC
(phone) +1 (917) 727-3445
(e-mail) jcamins at cpbibliography.com
(web) http://www.cpbibliography.com/
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