So I'm deleting all the Bisac subject headings (650_7|2bisacsh) from our ebook records - they were deemed not to be useful, especially as it would entail a for-fee indexing change to make them clickable. But I'm thinking if we someday have a discovery system, they'll be useful as a means for broader-to-narrower term browsing that won't require translation to English, as would call number ranges.
As I watch the system slowly chunk through them, I think about how library collections and catalogs facilitate jumping to the most specific subjects, but browsing is something of an afterthought.
What if we could set a ranking score for the "importance" of an item in browsing, based on circulation data - authors ranked by the relative circulation of all their works, same for series, latest edition of a multi-edition work given higher ranking, etc.? Then have a means to set the threshold importance value you want to look at, and browse through these general Bisac terms, or the classification? Or have a facet for "importance" threshold. I see Bisac sometimes has a broadness/narrowness facet ("overview") - wonder how consistently that's applied, enough to be useful?
Guess those rankings would be very expensive in compute time.
Well, back to the deletions.
Cindy Harper
Electronic Services and Serials Librarian
Virginia Theological Seminary
3737 Seminary Road
Alexandria VA 22304
703-461-1794
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