How do you intend to approach authorities search?
Our approach for authority records will have two separate focuses.
We will have a separate browse interface that you would enter from a search box on the advanced search page. A user would enter a term in an author, subject or author-title field, and that would give them an alphabetical list of author, subject or author-title headings. From there we would display a link with the total number of records for a heading, and users could view “see” references and click through to “see also’s,” “narrow term’s,” scope notes, etc. This is targeted more for the power user. We haven’t decided whether the browse/searching headings records (authorized and non-authorized) will be in a completely separate index, but they will be effectively separate, with particular searches targeting only one set or the other. We are still investigating whether keeping both record sets in one index might improve headings browse/search by retrieving works-level (bib) information within headings-level (auth-ish) searches.
The second focus is on improving the quality of our existing Blacklight searches. We plan to pull authority record data into our works-level (bib) Blacklight index records. Where the authority record provide strong equivalence data, as opposed to “see also” references, we will populate equivalent forms into the index. For example, a current search in our Blacklight catalog for works authored by Eugene Dynkin will fail against most records using authorized headings, because the authorized form for the author is “Dynkin, E. B. (Evgeniĭ Borisovich), 1924-“. The authority record also lists the alternate form, “Dynkin, Eugene B., 1924-“. If each work that references the authorized form is also findable using the alternate form, then the search for Eugene Dynkin will be much more successful.
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