If you’ve been monitoring WebDewey’s update notification feature in the past few months, you may have noticed some big sets of changes coming through that may look confusing. Here’s an example from just this week:
So what’s going on here? It looks like there’s a lot appearing and disappearing at the same time. (You may also notice they’re all built numbers, as marked by the puzzle-piece icon.) Much of this is a quirk about how the system processes additions and deletions. At 513.0284, for example, it looks like “Abacus” was removed… or was it? It’s struck out in red but still present later on in that line. If you expand that line you’ll see this:
That gives you a better sense of the change. There’s a new Relative Index term “Arithmetic—equipment,” and the existing term of “Abacus” is still there.
This is part of a project the editors are doing with the help of a volunteer that we call isCaption. It’s based on a code that we put into the MARC fields ($9 isCaption) for a Relative Index link when we want it to display as the default caption in WebDewey. This subfield doesn’t display in WebDewey, but here’s how it looks in our internal Editorial Support System (ESS):
Where nothing is marked isCaption, WebDewey defaults to using the first term alphabetically. Since that can give a misleading sense of what a number is for, we use isCaption to pick a term similar to what we’d use as the caption for that number if it were a non-built number. In the case of 513.0284, it’s a perfectly good number for a work on the abacus, but the meaning of the class is wider (i.e., about all arithmetic equipment). Sometimes in the isCaption project, including with 513.0284, we’re adding new Relative Index terms to serve as isCaption. In other cases, we can select an existing one.
So far, we’ve reviewed all of the 700s and 900s as part of this project, and now we’re into the 500s. In a print environment, we didn’t need to worry about this sort of thing when we indexed a built number. Since the wealth of built numbers is a great strength of WebDewey, we want to make sure they appear with good context.
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