[Koha] Thesaurus and Authorities Files

[Steve/Ollie/Steven F. Baljkas]

Tuesday, May 25, 2004     21:32 CDT

Salut Paul!

> one month later, I answer ;-)

Thanks for the reply, belated or not. I know how busy you top-level folks are so don't feel badly.

As for the clarifications:

> * free form means in fact "rejected form". It's the text that is not used.

Okay. That is probably a really bad choice of words.

'Free form', when I have seen it in English-language cataloguing materials, tends to mean something like 'uncontrolled'. That is, something that is not necessarily a part of an official thesaurus or system of a given library but is being entered by the cataloguer anyway (sometimes in school libraries this can be used to identify materials an instructor wants for a particular project, or it can simply be a provisional term while one waits for a term to be added officially by LC or a term added locally for reasons of political sensitivity or other local-usage reasons).

> Replaced by the "stdlib", which mean "accepted form" (translation of the official french term, not sure it's OK in
>  english)

I think the English term would be "established form" or "preferred form". I have seen the latter used more than the former but the former is what I was taught formally.

I don't know what the consensus of the Koha community would be -- sound in, people! -- but wouldn't it be easier, more clear, and more user-friendly just to use the LC term "USE:"? This is what my class was taught in lib tech training and it does seem to have replaced the older x/xx system that one saw in LC, etc.

> * Authority & thesaurus is really poorly handled in 2.0. No BT or NT 
> neither UF. Only subdivision, accepted form & rejected form.

With the subdivisions, I don't know about UNIMARC, but one would want to be able to differentiate the different kinds of subdivisions for MARC21 (free-floating, form, geographic, chronological, etc.)

> * In 2.2 a complete MARC management of authorities will be available. 
> (Funded by ENSMP, in UNIMARC, but we will try to manage MARC21 too)

Great! As I wrote you before, I'd be glad to try and help. I'll start taking a look at UNIMARC authorities later this week and see what I can make of it.

Thanks again for the response, Paul. A bientôt!

Amitiés,
Steven F. Baljkas
library tech at large
Koha neophyte
Winnipeg, MB, Canada