Hi All - this is a new area for me, so it might be that I'm barking up the wrong tree or missing something fundamental. We are trying to build a browsable subject list in our discovery service (built on the Endeca technology). The  idea would be to expand terms and reveal the facets below which in turn are expandable - a subject tree which our users can browse the narrowr/broader terms. 

We use LCSH and my initial thought was to use the authority records from our catalogue (Symphony) to determine the relationship between terms. Dumping the authority records out I thought that I could use the 550 field - in particular the $w subfield and /0 (special relationship ). My (erroneous) assumption was that if a record did not have a broader term (i.e. a 550 $wg value) then it would sit at the top of the subject tree, and that they would be the very general subjects headings. As I found this obviously not the case. Looking at our authority records it appears that it is not possible to build a thesaurus like structure which shows the relationship between terms.

I know The Library of Congress offer "Classification Web" (http://www.loc.gov/cds/classweb/).  This might be overkill for what we need. Is there an open API which may help achieve what we want?

Stephen

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Stephen Graham
Library Systems Officer, IT Services
Queen Mary, University of London
Mile End Road
London E1 4NS
 
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