You are invited to attend the Core Faceted Subject Access Interest Group’s webinar during the American Library Association’s Core Interest Group Week.

Day: Tuesday, March 4, 2025

Time: 3:00 - 4:00 pm Eastern / 2:00 - 3:00 pm Central / 1:00 - 2:00 pm Mountain / 12:00 - 1:00 pm Pacific

Registration Link: https://ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8-Zn3WZfQk-PBB9SnLT-zg#/registration


Presentation 1: Automating Retrospective Population of MARC 386: A Feasibility Study
Presenter: Lucas Mak, Head, Metadata Strategies and Technologies, Michigan State University Libraries

The introduction of MARC 386 field allows catalogers to record creator’s/contributor’s characteristics in bibliographic records to provide access through demographic data points. Given it’s a relatively underutilized MARC field, legacy records generally do not have this piece of information in them. Even if libraries are committed to using MARC 386 in all current cataloging, its absence in legacy records could skew the search results and give a wrong representation of the coverage of a library collection. How to add MARC 386 into legacy records efficiently is the crux of the issue. This presentation will talk about the results of an experiment leveraging the Library of Congress Name Authority File and Wikidata to populate the MARC 386 field in legacy records. After giving an overview of the mechanism of this automated process, the presenter will evaluate the process based on both quantitative and qualitative data and discuss limitations and potential improvements.

Presentation 2: Faceted Subject Vocabularies Increase Representation of Marginalized Communities in Biomedical Research
Presenter: Mego Franks, Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist

The words a community uses to describe itself are important, especially when that community is marginalized, such as the LGBTQ+ community. In biomedical research, the standard MeSH controlled vocabulary provided by the premier biomedical database PubMed contains 45 terms relevant to LGBTQ+ identities. In comparison, the community-built controlled vocabulary Homosaurus contains 1,263. Now that MeSH can operate as a faceted subject vocabulary, the percentage of Homosaurus terms covered by MeSH jumps from 4% to 36%. The inclusion of more sexual and gender minority identities in biomedical research contributes to the battle against health inequity. My presentation will cover why this representation is important specifically in the context of biomedical research, how I conducted my comparison of vocabularies, and where to go from here as over half of the identities represented in the Homosaurus are still not represented in the MeSH vocabulary.

Presentation 3: Use of Faceted Vocabularies as Subjects in Metadata at UNT
Presenter: Hannah Tarver, Department Head, Digital Projects Unit, University of North Texas Libraries

The Digital Collections hosted by the University of North Texas Libraries include over 3 million digital objects from a wide range of provenances and resource types. Metadata records are described by editors from various departments of the Libraries and across multiple partner institutions, generally averaging 80-90 unique editors per month. All items are described using a locally-qualified Dublin Core schema (UNTL), which requires at least two subject values per record. This can include a combination of keywords and controlled terms from several vocabularies using a qualifier to label the “type” of subject for each value. These types include a local subject hierarchy, the University of North Texas Browse Subjects (UNTL-BS), to support browse-by-subject functionality, as well as a number of externally-controlled terms from AAT, LCGFT, LCMPT, and others. For vocabularies that expose terms as linked open data and that contain no more than 20,000 terms, we have also introduced searchable interfaces and validation in our metadata web forms to aid editors with adding authorized values. Although helpful, it has also created additional challenges, such as editors using terms from searchable vocabularies that may not be appropriate to an item or collection. This presentation will discuss our local approach to the use of multiple vocabularies simultaneously, the tools that we have implemented to validate those terms, and the benefits and challenges of subject assignment in a large digital library.

Learn more about Core Interest Group Week here: https://www.ala.org/core/continuing-education/interest-group-week

Learn more about the Core Faceted Subject Access Interest Group here: https://connect.ala.org/core/communities/community-home?CommunityKey=e7e81a9a-2cfa-43fe-8753-7975786df52c


FSAIG Co-chairs
Su Hyeon Kang ([log in to unmask]) 
Andrea Schuba ([log in to unmask])