Ted,
This is an excellent example.
I often ask people if they know what "bagged products" are, and the
usual answer is "huh?" Then I offer this picture (link below) and
watch as people immediately understand the term.
http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11538/
I'm an advocate for kind of controlled vocabularies you describe
here, but I've also seen how we can represent them in our systems in
ways that help the user make better sense of them.
Example: I often see "sociology of education" appear in our search
stats, while the correct LCSH is "educational sociology." Clearly
there's a huge number of users at my library that don't know the
LCSH, but they still need good results. My solution (and it's old hat
by now) was to display the aggregate subjects as a facet.
http://plymouth.edu/library/opac/search/sociology+of+education
And using your examples, the subject facets again reveal some very
useful information:
http://plymouth.edu/library/opac/search/eskimo
http://plymouth.edu/library/opac/search/inuit
The challenge I'm trying to meet is to provide sophisticated results
without increased complexity. The subject facets reveal what the
catalog knows (based on what librarians have acquired and the
metadata they have) about the keywords the user searched. We know
from previous studies that users modify their searches based on the
results returned, and I've seen lightbulbs appear in users as the
explore the facets.
The result is that a user who didn't know the LCSH before starting a
search learns it quickly.
That is, sophisticated tools can make complex research easy.
Now one of the things I'd like to see is tooltips for the LCSH facets
that offer a deeper explanation of what they are (and are not).
Notes:
1: the code serving the above links is over a year old and is
embarrassing, but it's got the largest collection of relevant items.
For a more interesting and up to date example of Scriblio (was
WPopac) see http://beyondbrownpaper.plymouth.edu/browse/ .
2: my library's collection doesn't come close to serving the needs of
somebody researching "Judaism and the difference between its concepts
of Messiahship and those of Christianity," the first example in your
original message.
--Casey
On May 8, 2007, at 3:15 PM, Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> Here's another example that shows the important role of librarians as
> information "experts." A lot of people today are under the impression
> that "Inuit" and "Eskimo" are equivalent terms. Generally Inuit is
> considered more appropriate to use. NLM's Medical Subject Headings
> accept that equivalence and establish Inuit as the term. But if you
> look
> at the LCSH hierarchy, you find that Eskimo is actually a broader term
> than Inuit. Here's the scope note for Inuit:
>
> "Here are entered works limited to the indigenous Arctic peoples of
> Greenland, Canada, and northern Alaska. Works discussing collectively
> the Inuit peoples and the related Eskimo peoples of southern and
> western
> Alaska and adjacent regions of Siberia, or works for which the
> individual group cannot be identified, are entered under ǂa Eskimos."
>
> Probably 70-80% of all Eskimos in the world are Inuits, but having
> spent
> one summer in Western Alaska, I'm aware there is another 20-30% who
> are
> Yupiks. The only term we have for both groups is Eskimos. This
> shows the
> close collaboration LCSH subject specialists have with people with
> knowledge of subject areas. Just looking at the LCSH syndetic
> structure
> is informative for a researcher. Keywords cannot provide that
> information without a lot more work on her part.
Casey Bisson
__________________________________________
Information Architect
Plymouth State University
Plymouth, New Hampshire
http://oz.plymouth.edu/~cbisson/
ph: 603-535-2256
Received on Tue May 08 2007 - 14:21:56 EDT