Tag: indexing

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Delphi series. Volume I / featuring Anna Leahy, Karen L. George, & Robert Perry Ivey. (OCLC #964631912)

The MARC 505 (Formatted Contents Note) in its basic format contains only one subfield ǂa with a contents note marked up with ISBD punctuation:

505 0_ ǂa Sharp miracles / by Anna Leahy -- The fire circle /
    by Karen L. George -- Letters to my daughter / by Robert
    Perry Ivey.

There are subfields for doing further markup, such as ǂt for titles and ǂr for statement of responsibility, and some ILS will even honor those and index the contents as titles and authors respectively:

505 00 ǂt Sharp miracles / ǂr by Anna Leahy -- ǂt The fire
    circle / ǂr by Karen L. George -- ǂt Letters to my daughter /
    ǂr by Robert Perry Ivey.

This is not the ideal way to index them however; the authors’ names are not in their authorized forms here, the statements of responsibility may include words like “by”, and the titles may include non-filing words like “The”. (There is a subfield ǂg for “Miscellaneous information” which could theoretically be used to “remove” such things, but the MARC documentation specifically says NOT to use it for that purpose.) For this reason, it is best to also include added entries for indexing:

700 12 ǂa Leahy, Anna, ǂd 1965- ǂt Sharp miracles.
700 12 ǂa George, Karen ǂq (Karen L.). ǂt Fire circle.
700 12 ǂa Ivey, Robert Perry. ǂt Letters to my daughter.
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Alfred : the first Continental flagship, 1775-1778 / John J. McCusker. (OCLC #446066)

The Name/Title derived search in OCLC can be done in the command line search by entering the first four letters of the author’s name and the first four letters of the title, separated by a comma. This is sometimes called a 4,4 search, and can be explicitly used using the nd: index.

There’s a surprising detail about this index (and other derived indexes involving names) which is that if the name starts with Mc or Mac followed by a capital letter (like McCusker), that Mc or Mac is only represented as “m” in the search. So the name/title derived search that would retrieve the above title is:

mcus,alfr
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Cinémas d’Afrique francophone et du Maghreb / Denise Brahimi. (OCLC #37413829)

While you can search titles for words using diacritics in Connexion client (there is a button to Enter Diacritics), you will find them just as easily typing them without, like for “cinémas”, you can search:

cinemas

Similarly, some punctuation between letters does not separate them into multiple words in the index, so you can search for “d’Afrique” as:

dafrique

Words with apostrophes index with a space as well, so you could also find this record with the search:

"d afrique"

but this would not retrieve records where a right single quote (’) is used, like in this record, so I am usually happiest using no space.

Other punctuation marks have different behavior. For example, periods, commas or hyphens between words are equivalent to space, so this title is also retrieved by the search:

francophone-et,du.maghreb
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From Aristotle to Schrödinger : the curiosity of physics / Antonis Modinos. (OCLC #867822764)

I didn’t spot the popular copy for this book on my first search because I did a personal name search for the author’s first and last name:

    pn: antonis and pn: modinos

Unfortunately, pn: indexes relatively few fields, all for access points:

    100/a,b,c,d,j,q,u
    700/a,b,c,d,j,q,u

I didn’t find the record, because the author’s name authority has been established only with his first initial:

    Modinos, A., ǂd 1938-

(details confirmed on distributor web sites).

A broader index for author names is au: which indexes the same fields as above, but many more as well, including 245ǂc (which would include the full form as transcribed in the statement of responsibility) but more unusual ones too, including:

  • 505ǂr – Statement of responsibility in a formatted contents note
  • 508ǂa – Creation/production credits note
  • 511ǂa – Participant or performer note