At 4:10 PM -0400 6/20/06, Sperr, Edwin wrote:
>That's perhaps the ur patron request. And to meet that need, subject
>analysis is one of the few ways in. Yes, the current *tools* for
>browsing/grouping subject headings suck, but that's precisely my
>complaint. We need to fix 'em.
So long as you include LCSH itself as one of those tools that need to
be fixed. Certainly, we need subject analysis, certainly we need
subject headings. But the nature of LCSH as a controlled vocabulary
is itself not well-suited for browsing and grouping and profiling in
the electronic environment. Software attempting to provide useful
browsing, grouping, profiling based on LCSH is fighting an uphill
battle, is necessarily going to be a precarious hack.
At least that's what some of us are suggesting. We who suggest that
need to be more clear about why this is so and what a different
system would look like, yes.
--Jonathan
>And we also need subject headings. Try a nice broad search in Google
>Book Search (tm) to see what retrieval looks like without them.
>
>Ed Sperr
>Digital Services Consultant
>NELINET, Inc.
>153 Cordaville Rd. Suite 200 Southborough, MA
>(508) 597-1931 | (800) 635-4638 x1931
Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 16:50:36 EDT