Bibliographic/authority indexing

Is this this right place to start asking about indexing? This topic is not stated in the list of what the M.M. category covers, but I cannot find it covered by any other category, and M.M. seems to me the closest (control of indexing is normally a function of the Cataloguing module in current LMS-es such as Aleph).

My main concern is around authorities, and ensuring that they are fully integrated into indexing. The topic ‘Ideas from Workshop on National Strategy for Shareable Local Name Authorities’ is in the right area but seems to be mainly about how cataloguers would use authorities (and primarily name authorities, though others are mentioned); I see authority control mentioned occasionally elsewhere, but nothing concrete. My need would be for indexing to integrate authorities into indexing (both browse and keyword indexes) at least as well as our current LMS (Aleph) and possibly better (Aleph has a substantial flaw in this area).

I am also concerned about being able to control indexing locally, however (whether authority-controlled or not). We are accustomed on Aleph to creating our own indexes for various purposes, e.g. within the last year we have imported data from our reading-list system into our MARC records in a local field and created a special browse index on the field (then taken other steps not related to indexing to ensure that this field gets included in the data forwarded to our university’s reporting system). We would not be able to work with a system that only allows a default set of indexes.

Hi @alan.exelby – the Metadata Management SIG is the right place to be talking about this, although I don’t think the discussion has reached this level of specificity yet. The model for descriptive metadata is firming up now. (There were some significant refinements made at the developer’s meeting in Dublin, Ireland, this week that will be reviewed by the SIG soon.)

I think it is fair to say that there will be an authorities app that can be used by other apps in the FOLIO platform. That work has not reached the prototyping stage, so there isn’t anything to point to. One important factor to keep in mind is that for now the FOLIO project considers the discovery layer implementation to be out of scope for development. We know that FOLIO will need to feed records to a discovery layer (and there will be mechanisms for doing that), but that the discovery layer is likely to be something like VuFind or Blacklight or EBSCO Discovery Service or Summon or Bibliocommons or something else entirely.

To follow up on my colleague Alan’s comment regarding indexing, we are as interested in back-office applications for specialist customer controlled indexing (for instance, retrieval of records based on the presence of a reading list note or via authority control) as much discovery applications. The extent to which we can customise indexes (and not rely on keyword searching) is important in a variety of essential back of house tasks.

it may be there is a different approach to this as the underlying technology is sufficiently different (i.e. custom filters) but it would be of value to us to understand how this type of use case is being addressed in development. (i.e. get me all records with a specific reading list mentioned in a notes field, or retrieve me all records linked to a specific authority for Civil War, America)

I’m primarily a systems person who is now engaged in a vendor-supplied authority project, and it has led me to want to expose authorities in the keyword index in my current webpac. A recent reference question showed me the potential for series authority records to link the successive name changes in series. Why aren’t we exposing this data to the user? Can anyone commen on how well the popular discovery layers do this?