[Koha] UseAuthoritiesForTracings does not seem to work

[Andreas Roussos]

Dear List,

We are running Koha 16.05.02 on Debian 8, installed from packages, with
unimarc flavor and koha's xslt set to off.

As we are gradually building our authorities’ thesauri, we would like
subject searches from records to behave as keyword subject searches and
include records with terms not yet confirmed as authorities.

Thus, under Administration in System preferences/Authorities
preferences/General we have set UseAuthoritiesForTracings to "Don't use"
authority record numbers instead of text strings for searches from subject
tracings.

However, when a subject search is prompted from a record, it returns only
records linked to the specific authority number (an) subject term, and
fails to return biblios with similar plain subject keywords (with no "an")
E.g. If in a biblio record, we click on Russia (an:3320, unimarc field
607a), it will only return records that have this geographical term (in
unimarc field 607a) as an authority (an:3320), and no records that include
such term as a simple non-authority keyword (in unimarc field 610a).

Somehow, the system preference change has no effect. Our case seems similar
to the one described in an earlier post by Francois Charbonnier (
https://lists.katipo.co.nz/public/koha/2014-October/041177.html), and
possibly remained unresolved.

Any guidance/assistance to what might be causing such behavior will be very
much appreciated.

Kind regards,
Andreas Roussos
Systems Administrator
Holy Monastery of the Paraclete