Order of MARC 100 Subfields in Alma Search

Owned by Sal Hamerman
Last updated: May 14, 2021 by Minjie Chen
3 min read


In an All titles search by Creator, 100 subfields that are indexed are re-ordered alphabetically, rather than treating the authorized heading string as an entire phrase. This causes problems when doing a Creator - Contains phrase/Starts With/Equals search for personal name headings that contain a $q (and potentially, $c).

Example: Lyndon B. Johnson

The authorized heading for Lyndon B. Johnson is Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), 1908-1973 (LCNAF). However, an All titles search for Creator - Equals - the exact heading string, as shown below:

finds zero results:

The same occurs for Creator - Starts With - Johnson, Lyndon B. (Lyndon Baines), even though the left-anchored search text matches the authorized form.

Meanwhile, searching by Creator - Starts With - Johnson, Lyndon B. 1908 or Creator - Starts With - Johnson, Lyndon B., with or without the $d value, retrieves the same number of results.





If the order of the $d and $q in the search text are flipped, the same results are retrieved:



This reveals that the subfields of name headings have been reordered alphabetically as they are indexed and retrieved by an All titles search, rather than following how they appear in the authorized access points. This may lessen the utility of authority records for enabling accurate identification and retrieval.

Workarounds

Contains keywords versus Contains phrase

Search by Creator - Contains keywords - your heading. This should generally return all the results where the creator is the person you are looking for. It will ignore the artificial order that Alma has imposed on the subfields.

Leave out $q

When the heading contains $c and/or $d, search by Creator - Starts With - $a (or $a $c $d) of your heading. For authors whose names are not too common, this should return the titles by that person. (Note that in rare cases, $c appears at the very end of the heading, and will have to be re-ordered accordingly.)

Authorities search

First, do an Authorities - Personal Name search for your heading. Find the LCNAMES (the Alma Vocabulary Code for LCNAF) heading for your author:

Second, select Search bibliographic headings matching this value.

This may return many more results than searching by Creator, as it does a keyword search for your heading across a much broader range of MARC fields, not just 1xx and 7xx. For Lyndon B. Johnson, this returned 452 results rather than the 46 returned in the searches above.

In fact, the search returned the same number of results as the following strategy did - searching the heading as keywords in both Name and Subject fields.

Further Questions

Other fields affected:

  • It is not known whether Alma's alphabetical ordering of subfields affects other MARC fields, such as $n and $p in the 245.

Updates to search and browse indexing

  • According to communication with ExLibris, subfield q indexing in search and browse will hopefully be updated in August 2021.