One possible model might be the National Library of Medicine's Unified
Medical Language System:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/umls.html
It is interesting to note that this is not a *replacement* for (the
elegant, though sometimes balky) Medical Subject Headings, but more of a
crosswalk/implementation tool for them (and a lot of other things
besides).
I'm not sure where all this is being implemented so far, but I believe
it powers a lot of the magic (and strong magic it is) behind PubMed.
Ed
________________________________
From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
[mailto:NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf Of Laura Akerman
Sent: Tuesday, June 20, 2006 4:59 PM
To: NGC4LIB_at_listserv.nd.edu
Subject: [NGC4LIB] Subject
I'm so glad this subject has come up!
I was thinking of questions to pose to this group, but maybe it would
work better to make some debatable statements (ya'll can agree or
disagree and expatiate)
1. For subject access, keyword indexing of full text is not good
enough.
2. Subject keywords in metadata are better than nothing, but controlled
vocabulary is needed.
3. Library of Congress subject headings are the only truly
comprehensive English language subject controlled vocabulary, but they
don't work well enough.
4. A truly useful subject controlled vocabulary would support:
a -- natural language searching
b -- "exploding" hierarchical search (allow searching of all
"narrower terms" and their "narrower terms" under a topic)
c -- expression of more complex relationships between topics
(relationship expressed by more than position in a string and "dash
dash").
d -- much more extensive references - perhaps using "term clusters"
or some other means, to support easy links between "user vocabulary" and
an identified concept, so that a smart catalog could lead the user to
choose the concept they want for ambiguous terms (such as "records" with
the sound recordings meaning versus business records versus peak sports
performance) and bring them records on the subject they want, without
their having to "learn" the controlled vocabulary.
e -- choice of preferred term for a particular catalog, (or perhaps
for a particular record?) without losing collocation and references.
f -- automated or semi-automated subject assignment
g - ? (what else?)
What do we need? (leave how to get it for later) and what's out there
that could be a model? How could the ideal subject vocabulary work?
There!
Laura
--
Laura Akerman
Technology and Metadata Librarian
Robert W. Woodruff Library, Room 128
Emory University
Atlanta, Ga. 30322
phone (404) 727-6888
fax 404-727-0053
K.G. Schneider wrote:
And we also need subject headings. Try a nice broad
search in Google
Book Search (tm) to see what retrieval looks like
without them.
"We need some kind of subject headings" and "we need LCSH" are
not one and
the same. That's what I'm trying to get at. Going from LCSH to
Google Book
Search is a false dichotomy.
Karen G. Schneider
kgs_at_bluehighways.com
Received on Tue Jun 20 2006 - 17:14:18 EDT