MyLibrary

It is possible to make your authority lists work harder by exploiting MyLibrary.

One of the purposes of authorities (controlled vocabularies) such as name authorities, subject headings, and classification schemes is to bring like things together. Searches (or browses for that matter) using authorities return all matter of content with similar characteristics. All the works of Mark Twain. All the coming of age stories. All the computer science books about Perl.

Working backwards you can use MyLibrary as a discovery agent starting with authority headings. Here how:

1. Create a MyLibrary instance.
2. Create a facet called “Name authorities”.
3. Acquire a name authority list, say from the Library of Congress, Fred 2.0, or as an export from your ILS.
4. Loop through each item in the list adding it to MyLibrary as a term.
5. Go to Step #2 for subject headings and classification numbers.
6. Create a searchable/browsable interface to your sets of facet/term combinations.
7. Upon selecting specific items from the interface(s), use the terms to either:
   1. redirect the user’s browser to external indexes such as WorldCat, Google, Amazon.com, Wikipedia, and/or your favorite bibliographic index, or better yet
   2. create a Web Services interface to sets of external indexes, present the results in the user’s window, and allow them to select items of interest ultimately updating your MyLibrary instance with external information resources
8. On a regular basis, go to Step #2.

From the user’s point of view, the interfaces created in Step #6 are a beginning point. Use the authorities as keys — helpful hints — for finding “authoritative” information. Consider expanding your authority list to include the content of dictionaries or thesauri.

Tags: General Information //