Can RDA Content, Media, and Carrier Coding Improve Discovery Facet Mapping?

Abstract

Online public catalogs have provided users with the option to conduct faceted searches for more than a decade. Although faceting is undoubtedly useful to the discovery process, the authors found that their system’s default facet mapping was inadequate for their researchers’ needs, particularly for the faceting of bibliographic formats, and librarians at their institution have worked extensively to revise this mapping. These revisions have relied on creating complex decision trees, which require the system to consult multiple fields and subfields in bibliographic records to assign more precise format facets. When their authority control vendor offered to add Resource Description and Access (RDA) coding to their bibliographic records, including the new Content, Media, and Carrier fields that describe formats with greater granularity than the General Material Designation, they questioned whether the new RDA coding might improve their public catalog’s format faceting. They found that the limitations of the MARC format as a data encoding standard meant that the RDA coding was not appreciably more useful to the format faceting process.