Is the quality of subject access significantly better with the online catalog than with the card catalogs? For many years, librarians have been discontent with the quality of subject access in card catalogs, and they hoped that the online catalog would offer significant improvements. This new book addresses this question from five different perspectives--research studies, opinion pieces from public and technical services librarians, special needs, the international perspective, and a comprehensive annotated bibliography of previous work. By exploring the progress of the online catalog to date and making suggestions for future research, the contributors to Subject Control in Online Catalogs provide important reading for public services and technical services librarians, as well as systems librarians. In one this single volume, you will find research studies promising new paths for systems developments, descriptions of international developments that have vital implications for American subject access, and the valuable perspectives of innovative public and technical services librarians.
This volume contains the proceedings of a special conference held in Florence, August 2009. The theoretical and methodological aspects of rethinking semantic access to information and knowledge are explored. Innovative projects deployed to cope with the challenges of the future are presented and discussed. This book offers a unique opportunity for librarians and other information professionals to get acquainted with the state of the art in subject indexing.
Is your library's portal as efficient as it could be? High-Level Subject Access Tools and Techniques explores the potential and early development of high-level subject access. It examines Web tools and traditionally maintained library structures that facilitate the automated relation of resources to high-level subject categories based on the descriptive metadata that already exists in traditional library records. It includes a research study of high-level subject browse structures, as well as hands-on reports of actual projects and development activities and an examination of the environment in which demand for high-level subject access arises. From the editor: “As the World Wide Web and graphic user interfaces developed in the 90s, libraries began to build gateways for their online resources. These gateways allowed library users to employ the browse, point, and click approach to resource discovery that they had come to expect from online tools. Most of these interfaces amounted to little more than hand-constructed lists of links. Today, many libraries offer access to users through a set list of broad topics, sometimes called a high-level browse display. Methods for populating these subject categories remain crude and their maintenance requires considerable resources. As a result, libraries have begun to look at ways of applying traditional techniques associated with cataloging to these new interfaces. Several goals are involved in these developments. Many hope to reuse data from library catalogs and thus limit maintenance burdens. Others seek to apply a more standard set of tools and principles to the construction of portals to allow greater cooperation among institutions that want to interoperate with each other.” This pathbreaking book examines vital issues in high-level subject access, including: subject trees and their relationship to the structure inherent in Dewey Classification emerging patterns in the development of browsing services, including a hierarchy of subjects that is not based in classification, a map that relates data from catalog records to the subject hierarchy, and tools for extracting data from a catalog and storing it in a separate database to produce a more flexible display task-based (as opposed to materials-based) subject lists the social issues that are associated with choosing categories—based on the nature and activity of an institution's library users the political issues involved in selecting disciplines or topics for a browsing service And presents fascinating case studies of: Columbia University's efforts to build an automatically generated browsable display based on Library of Congress Classification as it occurs in catalog records the High-Level Thesaurus Project (HILT), in which a group of libraries, archives, and museums attempted to find a common method for high-level subject access via portal
In a networked and globalized world of information the form of national bibliographies may have changed, however their major function remains unchanged: to inform about a country’s publication landscape, its cultural and intellectual heritage. Subject access offers a major route into this landscape providing information about the dispersion of publications in specific fields of knowledge and topics contained in a particular national publishing output. The Guidelines for Subject Access in National Bibliographies give graded recommendations concerning subject indexing policies for national bibliographic agencies and illustrating various policies by providing best practice examples.
