About ten years ago, I was wondering how to make the structure in LCSH, or
at least how it was encoded in MARC subject tags more useful, so when
implementing a prototype for a new library catalogue at the National
Library of Australia, I tried using the subject tag contents to represent a
hierarchy, then counted the number of hits against parts of that hierarchy
for a given search and then represented the subject tags in a hierarchy
with hit counts. One of the motivations was to help expose to the
searcher how works relevant to their search may have been
LCSH-subject-catalogued.
I'm a programmer, not a UI person, so the formatting of theresults were
fairly primitive, but that prototype from ten years ago ("Library Labs") is
still running.
For example, search results for /ancient egypt/
http://ll01.nla.gov.au/search.jsp?searchTerm=ancient+egypt&keywords=0.5&keywordWildcard=0.05&titlePhrase=12.0&authorPhrase=9.0&subjectPhrase=9.0&genrePhrase=9.0&titleWords=4.0&authorWords=3.0&subjectWords=3.0&genreWords=3.0&titleExact=18.0&authorExact=15.0
/computer art/
http://ll01.nla.gov.au/search.jsp?searchTerm=computer+art&keywords=0.5&keywordWildcard=0.05&titlePhrase=12.0&authorPhrase=9.0&subjectPhrase=9.0&genrePhrase=9.0&titleWords=4.0&authorWords=3.0&subjectWords=3.0&genreWords=3.0&titleExact=18.0&authorExact=15.0
/history of utah/
http://ll01.nla.gov.au/search.jsp?searchTerm=history+of+utah&keywords=0.5&keywordWildcard=0.05&titlePhrase=12.0&authorPhrase=9.0&subjectPhrase=9.0&genrePhrase=9.0&titleWords=4.0&authorWords=3.0&subjectWords=3.0&genreWords=3.0&titleExact=18.0&authorExact=15.0
This prototype also explored a subject hierarchy which had been of interest
to the NLA's Assistant Director-General, Dr Warwick Cathro, over many
years, the RLG "Conspectus" hierarchy, which I guess was not unlike BISAC
in its aims. It is shown further down the right-hand column.
Both the subject hierarchy and Conspectus were interesting, but neither
made it into the eventual production search system, Trove, implemented at
the NLA, in which subject faceting or hierarchy is absent from results
display:
http://trove.nla.gov.au/book/result?q=ancient+egypt
http://trove.nla.gov.au/book/result?q=computer+art
http://trove.nla.gov.au/book/result?q=history+of+utah
The "Library Labs" prototype is running on a small VM, so searching may be
slow, and it hasnt been updated with any content since 2006.. But maybe
the way it attempted to provide subject grouping and encourage narrowing of
search by LCSH or exploring using LCSH rather than the provided search
terms may trigger some more experiments.
Kent Fitch
On Thu, Apr 14, 2016 at 3:11 AM, Mark Watkins <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> <head starting to swim> :)
>
> sounds like there is a lot of useful metadata but somewhat scattered
> amongst various fields, depending on when the item was cataloged or tagged.
> Which seems to correspond to anecdotal surfing of the Harvard data.
>
> I guess my new task is to build something that aggregates and reconciles
> portions of LCSH, LCFGT, and GSAFD :).
>
> Thanks for the additional perspective!
>
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