Huh?

So, I'm in the midst of NACO training. It's really helpful for me to understand how name authority records work, but there's one piece of information that's got me stumped...

The trainer said that in authority records for Musical Groups, you can't have a "see also" reference to individual members of the group and vice versa *unless* the members are named in the name of the group.

For example, you can't make "see also" references from The Beach Boys to Brian Wilson and vice versa. You can, however, make "see also" references from the group Sonny & Cher to it's individual members.

On the surface, it makes sense. You'd end up spending a ton of time making those connections. And, the trainer did say that one could do that locally, just not in the national authority file.

But let's say a user does a search for Brian Wilson in his library catalog. Wouldn't be nice (hee hee...) for that user to also get directed to The Beach Boys, too? Maybe he doesn't want music by the Beach Boys--maybe he only wants Smile--but it would be nice to give the user a reminder.

I would guess that the sticky wicket isn't in putting a "see also" reference in Brian Wilson's authority record, but in putting "Brian Wilson" in the Beach Boys' authority record. You can't realistically make authority records for every member of every band, and there's no way to predict which members of any given band will be popular.

I did some searching, and it looks like libraries do link "Brian Wilson" with "Beach Boys" in bibliographic records by making Wilson an added entry in all of the records for Beach Boys albums. So when you search for Brian Wilson, you do get linked to the Beach Boys records, but it happens inside the results screen.

I wonder how useful it is for the user to get to results delivered to them this way. For me, I don't want my Brian Wilson mixed in with my Beach Boys, but I want to be pointed in that direction, too.

At the end of the day, rules like this bring order to our little corner of the world. And there are ways to make it work. It just made me wonder about whether or not we make rules like this to help ourselves or to help the users.

Feel free to fill me in on the finer points of this, if you know them. I am happy to change my position as it might have been made in ignorance.

--Erin