My bad in (2) that should have been 781 and it’s LC’s way to indicate the 
geographic form used for a 181 when a heading may be geographically subdivided. 
The point is, when you are trying to do authority matching/mapping you have to 
match against the 181’s in LCSH *and* the 781’s in NAF.  This is an oddity of 
the LC authority file that people may not be aware of, hence why I pointed it 
out.  As I indicated, in my mapping projects I have taken LCSH and added new 
181 records based on the 781’s found in NAF.  This allows the matching process 
to work reasonably well without dragging in the entire NAF for searching and 
matching.  However, this still doesn’t give the complete the picture since in 
LCSH the *construction rules* allow you to use things in the name authority 
file as subjects, ugh.  Effectively, LCSH isn’t useful by itself when trying to 
match/decompose 6XX in bibliographic records.  You really need access to NAF as 
well.  Things get worst when talking about the Children’s headings… since you 
can pull from both LCSH and NAF, ugh-ugh.  While LC would like us to think of 
the authority file as three separate authorities, LCSH, LCSHac, NAF, in reality 
the dependencies require you to ignore the thesaurus boundaries and just treat 
the entire authority file as one thesauri.  We struggled with this in the 
terminology services project, especially when the references in one thesaurus 
cross over into the other thesauri.

 

Andy.

 

From: Ya'aqov Ziso [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Thursday, April 07, 2011 13:47
To: Code for Libraries; Houghton,Andrew
Cc: Hickey,Thom; LeVan,Ralph
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] LCSH and Linked Data

 

Andrew, as always, most helpful news, kindest thanks! more [YZ] below:

 

1.       No disagreement, except that some 151 appears in the name file and 
some appear in the subject file:
n82068148           008/11=a             008/14=a             151 _ _ $a England
sh2010015057    008/11=a             008/14=b             151 _ _ $a Tabasco 
Mountains (Mexico)
[YZ] would it be possible then to use both files as sources and create one file 
for geographical names for our purpose(s)?

2.       Yes, see n50000359
151 _ _ $a Sonora (Mexico : State)
751 _ _ $z Mexico $z Sonora (State)

[YZ]  Both stand for a distinct cataloging usage. Jonathan's suggestion to 
consult LC may answer the question of which field/when to use for geographical 
names

3.       Oops, my apologies to my VIAF colleagues, I believe that geographic 
names are in the works… 

[YZ] inshAllah!

 

4. That is probably correct. England may appear as both a 110 *and* a 151 
because the 110 signifies the concept for the country entity while the 151 
signifies the concept for the geographic place. A subtle distinction...

[YZ] Exactly. This distinction called for creating both a 110 AND a 151. But we 
are talking about 151. The case where there is both a 110 and a 151 does NOT 
apply to geographic names, only to some.

 

[YZ] VIAF would be helpful to provide a way to limit geographical names ONLY to 
151 names and their cross references.

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