Recent enhancements to The CAT and LionSearch

by John Attig, Cataloging and Metadata Services

During December, the Libraries successfully enhanced and reloaded our entire database of over 5 million bibliographic records and 2 million authority records. The enhancement work was done by our authority control vendor, Backstage Library Works.

One of the goals of this processing was to provide a fresh and up-to-date authority file; this should maximize the consistency of access to our data through The CAT and through LionSearch. In addition, Backstage updated our bibliographic records, correcting numerous data and encoding errors.

The other goal was to make changes associated with the new cataloging rules, RDA, in as many records as possible. We have been using RDA for several years now, and new features have been showing up in recent records, but now they will be present on almost all our records. Almost all of these changes will only be visible on the “Detailed Information” tab in The CAT; the most noticeable changes will be:

  • expansion of many abbreviations to their full forms — e.g. “333 pages” instead of “333 p.”. In the example below, see “approximately” [instead of “approx.”]
  • inclusion of fields that identify the type of content and the type of carrier in every record; these elements replace the General Material Designations (GMDs) that were included in the titles of many records; existing GMDs and not being deleted, but are not being added to new records; the new content/carrier fields will be used instead; the new fields are included in the keyword index. In the example below, see “Content type: two-dimensional moving image; Media type: video; Format: videodisc”
  • publication, distribution, manufacture, and copyright information is being split into separate fields, with appropriate labels

StarWars

In addition to these changes, some new keyword and browse indexes have been added. The most useful of the new indexes is for “Genre/Form” terms, which identify what a resource is, rather than what it is about. So you can search for a novel, as opposed to a book about novels. In the example above, see “Genre index term: Science fiction films”

In WorkFlows, you can select the new indexes from the dropdown list in the search interface; they apply to both keyword and browse indexes. In The CAT, you cannot search the new browse indexes; to search the keyword indexes, you need to add the index name following the search term, e.g. “novels {655}” will search that term in the Genre/Form index.

The indexes for LionSearch are also being rebuilt to incorporate all the revised records.
If you find problems or errors in LionSearch, please report them to ul-er-help@list.psu.edu.
If you find problems in The CAT, please report them to the Cataloging Expert Team ul-sirsi-cataloging@lists.psu.edu.