Author Alphabetical Searches

I think it's time to take a break from talking about the new patron catalog. Instead, let's talk about the Author Alphabetical search index results.

One of the many confusing aspects of our catalog is how it displays author results when using an Author Alphabetical search index. For example, take a look at the author results for Janet Evanovich. We see something like this:

1.	Evanovich, Janet	230
2.	Evanovich, Janet. High five. Spanish	1
3.	Evanovich, Janet. Ivan takes a wife	5
4.	Evanovich, Janet. One for the money.	2
5.	Evanovich, Janet. Plum lovin'.	1
6.	Evanovich, Janet. Plum lucky.	1
7.	Evanovich, Janet. Three to get deadly.	2
8.	Evanovich, Janet. Two for the dough.	2
9.	Evanovich, Janet. Visions of sugar plums.	1

Why are there so many Janet Evanovich entries? A couple of weeks ago, Eric Petersen, our Technical Services Supervisor, answered this question. So, with his permission, I'm copying it below.

Author/title’s in the “author” indexes are generally of these purposes:

1. The author/title heading represents an instance of that work in a collection. For example, in a collection of short stories. “One for the money” is part of the collection Three plums in one.
2. To indicate what the original title of a work was. For example, ”Ivan takes a wife” is the original title of Love overboard. This can also be seen on items that are translations. “High five. Spanish” means that this item, High five, is in Spanish.
3. The author/title is related to the item cataloged. This is seen most in our catalog for movie adaptions of books. For example: Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the goblet of fire. lists the movies, not the books.

However, if you've used a lot of other library systems, you'll have seen that many of their author results are not as confusing. Basically, this is because our particular ILS processes author entries a little differently than other systems. It does not have the ability to just show the author's name. Instead, it shows the entire entry for the author/work combination. Theoretically, we could kludge something together that would fix the display problem. However, this would likely result in our catalog records no longer meeting common cataloging standards. This, in turn, would complicate any ILS changes we made in the future.

So, which author entry should I pick when faced with multiple authors that look the similar? I usually click whichever entry has the most titles attached to it. In the case of Janet Evanovich, it would be the first entry.