Derived search keys for government documents

摘要

The purpose of this study was to propose a design for a Superintendent of Documents (SuDocs) number search key to retrieve bibliographic records for United States Government documents from OCLC's On-Line Union Catalog. Experimentation with a test file of 25,000 records indicated that a search key derived from a maximum of the first 14 digits in the SuDocs number is sufficiently distinctive to obtain an expected average retrieval of 2.5 records per search. OCLC will implement a SuDocs number search key in the future. It is expected that this key will be a valuable tool for library catalogers and users.