Chapter 47. Infrastructure Changes to Authority Browse

Table of Contents

Backend functionality
Staff User Interface

As part of a larger development and consulting project to improve how authority records are used in public catalog browse, improvements have been made to how authority records are indexed in Evergreen. This will not result in any direct changes to the public catalog, but will create infrastructure for improvements to the browse list. Specifically, a configuration table will be used to specify how browse entries from authority records should be generated. This new tables will supplement the existing authority control set configuration tables but will not replace them.

Backend functionality

The new configuration table, authority.heading_field, specifies how headings can be extracted from MARC21 authority records. The general mechanism is similar to how config.metabib_field specifies how bibliographic records should be indexed: the XML representation of the MARC21 authority record is first passed through a stylesheet specified by the authority.heading_field definition, then XPath expressions are used to extract the heading for generating browse entries for the authority.simple_heading and metabib.browse_entry tables.

The initial set of definitions supplied for authority.heading_field use the MARCXML to MADS 2.1 stylesheet; this helps ensure that heading strings extracted from authority records will match headings extracted from bibliographic records using the MODS stylesheet.