BUGish: Minimum data requirements for a Factbook record

MJ. Smith

I was looking at Singer, Isidore, ed. The Jewish Encyclopedia: A Descriptive Record of the History, Religion, Literature, and Customs of the Jewish People from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, 12 Volumes. New York; London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1901–1906. as a potential source of an example for another post when I discovered that it lacked some basic tagging on headwords that I assumed was there. So MJ being MJ I started adding some Community Tags which led to:

• tag Aaron - no problem
• tag Aaron's rod - no problem
• try to tag Aaron's tomb ... appears to have no record which is mildly annoying
• see lots of people with first name of "Aaron" that I am too lazy to see who might be in the Logos Controlled Vocabulary which is light on the Jewish stuff ..
• try to tag Ab ... which I did succeed in doing but which provided a perfect example of how frustrating it can be to find the right tag ...

1. I select the word, right click to bring up the Context Menu, select Community tag
2. The Community Tag window opens
3. The window populates with it's best stab in the dark at what I want, returning a likely entry "Ab topic" but is a calendar item (month) a topic? I don't know so I hover
4. which brings up a popup which for many entries gives me enough information to know if it is the right entry .... however, here it is no help
5. So I bring up Factbook to the entry I am considering and see, yes, this is the calendar month entry. I select it and have myself another link between my resource and Factbook and searches ...

It seems to me that with a view multiple meaning items, the hover step (4) should provide me with enough information to know what the entry is. A significant portion of the time it does, but I have not totally determined when I do/don't get the needed information. But the LCV has been around long enough it seems that it should always meet some minimal standards.

Sean Boisen

A quick look suggests we haven't done LCV alignment on this resource (it has some other issues as well). If we had, that might have generated a request to add a new LCV record for Aaron's Tomb: that's not unusual for extensive resources like this one. Even then, it's not clear we would: in my library of ~6k resources, i don't see any other article-length treatments of this subject, so there's not much for such a resource to link to. 

Since LCV by definition is "Controlled", it doesn't include everything. This resource in particular has a lot of subjects outside the typical scope of a biblical encyclopedia.