Old Indexed Headings Retained in OPAC & GUI Browse Display

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Article Type: General
Product: Aleph
Product Version: 18.01

Description:
Browse author heading "Trujillo, D. Morgan" in the Web OPAC or GUI. It displays as “Trujillo, D, Morgan” (comma after “D”).

A cataloger downloaded this record from OCLC with the erroneous comma on 7 August 2008. She fixed this name heading in ALEPH almost immediately (also Aug 7th), but the browse display still shows the error form.

Web OPAC browse display: Trujillo, D, Morgan (with a comma)
GUI browse display: Trujillo, D, Morgan (with a comma)
MARC21 record display: 1001 L $$aTrujillo, D. Morgan. (with a period)

We run manage-15 weekly (on Fridays), and we assume this deletes "unlinked" headings. What I'm confused about is why this particular heading (Trujillo with the comma) still appears to be "linked" to the BIB record. I'm assuming it's still linked, anyway, because in the GUI browse display there's a visible record count of "1" and I can retrieve the BIB via this erroneous heading.

I checked the phrase indexing for this record via UTIL, and it shows the version with the period, not the comma.

How might this have happened? How can we fix it? How can we prevent this from happening in future? I know that a comma vs. period is not too significant, but I'm concerned that this might also occur in cases that would have a more disturbing effect on retrieval.

Resolution:
This is a characteristic of the normalization process applied to punctuation. Because commas and periods are stripped out of the index for sorting purposes, the indexing procedure doesn't recognize the change and therefore doesn't update the index entry - specifically the Display form of the index entry.

This doesn't really have an impact on the system, other than the fact that the display in the index is wrong. There is a fairly recent development that allows you to correct this. Here's what you can do.

1) Open the GUI Cataloging module.
2) Browse the Author index for Trujillo.
3) Highlight the erroneouse Heading by clicking on it.
4) Click the Correct Display button on the right.
5) This will bring up a window that shows the Display Text, the Normalized Text and the KEY form of the heading on the left. The display text is repeated in a field to the right under New.
6) Change the comma following the D to a period.
7) Click the Correct Button
8) Click the Update Button

This will correct the display in both the OPAC and the Cataloging GUI.

Article last edited: 10/8/2013