On 4/22/2011 3:30 PM, Deborah Fritz wrote:
People *will* be entering free text as this RDA element, so I would like to know whether anyone has figured out some way that matching algorythms will be able to reliably match descriptions without the use of consistent terms in this element.
No, and nobody will. It's essentially impossible, as I suspect you knew when you asked. :) "reliably match descriptions without the use of consistent terms in this element."
One idea is if perhaps the matching algorithm could use the new 3xx fields instead of the 300 "type of unit" free text. Of course, that relies on the new 3xx fields using only controlled terms, which I'm not sure is the case (but should be!).
I had sort of been thinking (perhaps incorrectly?), that the new 3xx fields will be from controlled terms, and serve the purposes of machine matching and collocation, while the old 300 will be for user display only. It is not an unusual pattern in our data to have controlled fields corresponding with transcribed fields (although in this case it's not transcribed exactly, but still perhaps a display field rather than a controlled/collocating field).
Does that make any sense? Jonathan
