WHAT THEY'RE USED FOR:
The Broader and Narrower Term fields record the Authority Terms that are defined as being of Broader or Narrower meaning to the current term (i.e. to the term you are viewing on screen at the moment).
A reciprocal relationship is automatically maintained between Broader and Narrower terms as follows:
oIf, when viewing a term, another term is entered as its Broader term, the system will automatically enter the current term as the Narrower term of that term.
oIf, when viewing a term, another term is entered as its Narrower term, the system will automatically enter the current term as the Broader term of that term.
It is this relationship that allows the system to search effectively through various levels of a hierarchy. For example once these relationships have been established, a search on California can locate records associated with California and all the places in California.
HOW TO USE THEM:
The Broader and Narrower fields are filled automatically by the system whenever you enter a Next Higher Term for a term.
For example, when you enter California as the Next Higher Term of San Francisco, the system also enters California as a Broader term for San Francisco, and enters San Francisco as a Narrower Term for the term California.
However, there may be situations where you will want to establish additional Broader and Narrower relationships yourself by entering terms directly in these fields.
It may be useful to cluster the various States of the United States into regional groupings such as the Northeast, Southwest, Midwest, etc. to enable searches based on these regions. You may not, however, want these regional names to appear in the hierarchy as a formal part of the name of the State (e.g. Bangor/Maine/Northeast/ United States of America/North America) and will, therefore, NOT wish to enter Northeast as the Next Higher Term of Maine.
Instead, you can create terms for regions (e.g. Northeast), entering United States of America as the Next Higher Term of each of these regions, and can manually enter all the States of that region in its Narrower Terms field e.g. for the term Northeast, enter New York, Connecticut, Maine, etc as its Narrower terms. The system will then automatically record the region as a Broader Term for each of these States.
This will allow you to easily and quickly perform searches on a region without having to specify all the States that form that region. The region search will be automatically expanded to include all its narrower terms (i.e. the States, and places within those States).
The Broader Term and the Next Higher Term of a term are both hierarchically superior to the term. The difference is that a term can only have one Next Higher Term, i.e. it can only be directly linked upwards to one term. It can, however, have a number of Broader terms (i.e. a number of terms which are conceptually larger than itself). For example Maine can be directly linked upwards only to United States of America, but can have both United States of America and the Northeast as Broader terms.
Broader and Narrower are authority controlled fields.
Enter the term (or its System ID) in the field if you know it. (If you enter the term incorrectly, or if there is more than one matching term, the Authority Search window will appear, allowing you to select or search for a term.)
You can also click on the Options button 
to select a term.
