Maybe I'm missing something, but don't have to place something in a given category, but we can have referrals from other categories? For example, if I went and found "United States" and clicked on it, what would I see at the top?ritcheymt wrote:Again, though, that's the nice thing about categories. Like all db tags, you don't have to have an either/or choice. So you could have something like this:
Countries
[INDENT]All countries (modern and historic)
Historic countries
Modern countries
Countries by continent
[/INDENT]
Modern countries > United States
or
North America > United States
I'm thinking "Modern counties" would just be a index to finding things that are actually in the "Countries by continent" section.
Except the LoC has a very diverse set of users. We're focused on the needs of Genealogists. While I wouldn't discard LoC out of hand, I'd want to make sure that makes the most sense for our users. I find the idea that we might have to move countries between top level categories just because they decide to change names the sign of a questionable system. That might make perfect sense to a library that's there to support Congress because politicians are interested in the here and now. But we're more interested in history and how it ties to records we can find today - which blurs dividing things into historical and modern.ritcheymt wrote:we'll want to use Library of Congress authorities to help us generate the names above -- the folks who maintain these authorities have changed them many times over generations to accommodate new ones they continually add. So rather than us doing a lot of painful trial-and-error, we'll benefit from decades of trial-and-error of a much more experienced institution.