authority records and retrival

["Zhou, Don" <dzhou@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I am seeking collective help to possibly solve our problem here:

We have a series called Minnesota Practice.  It is a numbered series and
642 field in authority tells us to use v. in front of volume number.  We
class the series by the subject matter, not as a whole set.  For
instance, vol 1-1a is cataloged as follows:


245 10 Civil rules annotated /|cby David F. Herr and Roger S. 
       Haydock
490 1  Minnesota practice series ;|vv. 1-1A 
500    Includes index 
525    Kept up to date by pocket supplements 
650  0 Civil procedure|zMinnesota 
650  0 Court rules|zMinnesota 
700 1  Haydock, Roger S 
830  0 Minnesota practice ;|vv. 1-1A


Notice the v. 1-1a in the 830 field.  When our patron wants to find this
series, if the search term for title is Minnesota practice, the result
is not what the patron wants.  Books such as Minnesota practice manuals,
Minnesota practice guide, and other books would appear before Minnesota
practice.  The reason is that the "v" is indexed.  V is way behind in
the alphabetical order.  A patron can get to the series directly using
title search as Minnesota Practice v.  But we cannot ask our patrons to
search that way, or at least not a reasonable librarian would ask a
reasonable patron to search that way.   

Here is the question:  anybody has ever had to wrestle with this kind of
indexing and retrieval problem for series?  If you do, how did you do in
your case? If you have not encountered it but know how to solve the
problem, I would appreciate your advice and solutions.  What I hope to
see is that at least Minnesota practice series should appear before
Minnesota practice manual. The best outcome would be to have the whole
set appear together with the number of hits showing in the left column
to inform the patron that we have a bunch of them by that title, so
click on.  

Thanks in advance.

Don Zhou
Head, Technical Services
William Mitchell College of Law











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