Hi Mark,

We are also interested in providing hierarchical browsing for some of our
collections, though our reasons and goals may be different from yours. We
have very large book collections and want to offer users a way to navigate
beyond searching/filtering or "browse all." Our idea is to use the call
numbers for the books, which map to LC class and subclass, which is a
hierarchy. We haven't done this yet, so I can't show you an example, but I
wonder if it's something you can use for your project.

So far, we do allow users to "find similar" titles by clicking on LCSH
subjects for a given book:

http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/browse/?page=1

Not sure if this type of navigation might be useful to you.

Best,

Carol

On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 8:05 AM, Mark Watkins <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

> I'm interested to use the LCSH data contained in the Harvard Open Metadata
> project to provide some hierarchical browsing (e.g. Fiction -> Mysteries ->
> Historical Mysteries on top of a book database.
>
> I'm a library sciences newbie, but it seems like LCSH doesn't really
> provide a formal hierarchy of genre/topic, just a giant controlled
> vocabulary. Bisac seems to provide the "expected" hierarchy.
>
> Is anyone aware of any approaches (or better yet code!) that translates
> lcsh to something like BISAC categories (either BISAC specifically or some
> other hierarchy/ontology)? General web searching didn't find anything
> obvious.
>
> Thanks!
>
> Mark
>



-- 
Carol Kassel
Senior Manager, Digital Library Infrastructure
NYU Digital Library Technology Services
[log in to unmask]
(212) 992-9246
dlib.nyu.edu