[Koha] subject heading authority control (MARC21)

[januszop at gmail.com]

Dear Colleagues,

This is a question about the use of authority records for controlling
subject heading fields (6xx) in MARC21. 

In a standard Koha MARC21 installation the same set of authorities
(PERSO_NAME, CORPO_NAME, MEET_NAME, UNIF_TITLE) is set up to control both
the form headings (1xx/7xx/8xx) and subject headings (6xx).  With this
configuration the user, when searching by authorities ("Browse by author or
subject" in OPAC or the librarian using "Authorities"), is unable to
distinguish: is the heading used as a form heading or subject heading, e.g.
when searching, by authorities,  for "Shakespeare, William" the user would
get both: records in which Shakespeare is used as responsibility and the
records about Shakespeare (with Shakespeare in 600).

For me and my libraries this is not satisfactory.  Is anybody facing the
same issue?

So, a possible solution is to create a parallel set of authority types (like
S_PER_NAME, S_COR_NAME, etc.), which nearly duplicates the number of
authority types.  This solution, however, has a number of drawbacks: 1) at
least AuthoritiesMarc ::GuessAuthTypeCode function has to be modified,  2)
drop-down lists with authority types in authority searches become
unreasonably long (users suggest there should be only "By author", "By
subject", no matter if it is a person, a corporate body or a meeting or
whatsoever, and "By title").

This is how I am planning to resolve this, but maybe there is a better idea?
Or any comments that would shed some light on this issue?

Thank you very much!

Best regards,

Janusz Kaczmarek
--
Library of the Dominican House of Studies
Cracow, Poland