Ted P Gemberling wrote:
> I do think, though, that this is a somewhat different use of the term
> "faceted" than what I believe is traditional. I think traditionally,
> "faceted subjects" meant subjects that have been "decomposed" into
> separate logical elements that are extremely general,
I agree that the term 'facetted' is somewhat vague here, and would
prefer a new term.
But note that these so-called facetted subject interfaces we are seeing,
including those powered by the proprietary Endeca software, as well as
the open source SOLR software (Casey's is such), and others---DO
decompose LCSH pre-coordinated subdivisions:
Social sciences -- Research -- Political aspects.
<https://catalog.library.jhu.edu/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=117Q733802F09.11410&profile=general&uri=search=PSUB%7E%21Social%20sciences%20--%20Research%20--%20Political%20aspects.&ri=1&aspect=power&menu=search&source=%7E%21horizon>
=> Becomes three seperate terms in the 'facetted' display: "Social
sciences", "Research", and "Political aspects", all in the 'topic' facet.
"Medicine -- United States -- History" also becomes three separate
terms, but only two of them are in the 'topic' facet, and one of them
(United States) is in the 'geographic' facet.
These LCSH's are indeed decomposed.
Note that the FAST project is an attempt to approach this decomposing
project in a little bit more careful way. Just a little bit.
As I posted before, I think more research is needed into what makes a
controlled vocabularly suitable for this kind of display, how to provide
this kind of display without loss of information, and how to get LCSH
there in a reasonable way. I can respect, for instance, Thomas Mann's
complaints about how the pre-coordination of LCSH provides important
information that is lost in this kind of decomposing. However, at the
same time, we _need_ to provide these kind of browseable interfaces. How
can we do this without tossing out useful cataloger supplied
information? It's an open question, and one that needs to be
investigated, not rejected.
Jonathan
> so that it's easy
> to move from one combination of the elements to another. I suppose maybe
> the "decomposition" is present on Lamson's Endeca-type page with the
> distinction between subjkey, author, format, and Meta. But the subjects
> themselves in subjkey are not faceted in that traditional sense.
>
> That leads to another point in response to Jonathan. If we're going to
> pursue making LCSH more "faceted," I think we should consider the way
> the National Library of Medicine does it rather than FAST. Lois Mai Chan
> herself has said FAST has a serious problem because when you decouple
> subfield x's from their main headings, they often become kind of
> meaningless. As someone pointed out at ALA last year, if a book has
> these headings in LCSH:
> 600 10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822--Philosophy
> 600 00 Plato--Influence
>
> (obviously a book on Plato's influence on Shelley) in FAST it will be:
> 600 10 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822
> 600 00 Plato
> 650 Philosophy
> 650 Influence
>
> "Influence" is pretty meaningless, I think, and Philosophy is too
> general. This is not a general book on philosophy. NLM's Medical Subject
> Headings, as implemented in their own catalog (http://locatorplus.gov/)
> keep the subfield x's with the main headings. They only break out the
> geographic and form subdivisions into separate 65X's. This is not to say
> LCSH should entirely copy MeSH, since MeSH doesn't have subdivisions
> like philosophy or influence, but the general plan of MeSH is better
> than FAST.
>
> I appreciate the work Kristin and others have done with Endeca, but one
> area where I might disagree a bit is on the value of subject browse
> screens. As Thomas Mann has pointed out, browse screens do a lot to help
> a researcher figure out the range of related subjects. The subject
> results go beyond what the searcher might have known on his own and are
> informative in themselves. That is a sort of "faceting" in a sense, in
> that the screens allow a searcher to see a basic term conjoined with
> various others. He tells of showing a researcher how doing a subject
> search for Yugoslavia rather than a keyword search allowed her to see a
> great variety of headings such as "... Antiquities (including
> "Antiquities, Roman" and others), "... Armed forces--History," and many,
> many others. (I am grateful that Endeca didn't eliminate these browse
> screens while emphasizing keyword searches).
>
> One last comment to Kristin. She lamented that a subject search on her
> library's catalog for "Educational sociology" only gives 618 hits, while
> a keyword search for "sociology of education" gives 848. There is
> perhaps also the added discrepancy that the Endeca "facet" list only
> gives 388 hits when you do the keyword search for sociology of
> education. But to tell you the truth, I consider that a rather small
> problem. I think this kind of goes to the heart of the "seamless" issue.
> What's wrong with a patron having to go to a library staff member or
> reference librarian and ask how to find more resources? Why should we go
> to such links to do all the work for patrons? Another thing to keep in
> mind is that in attempting to do all that work, we may also be working
> ourselves out of our jobs!
> --Ted Gemberling
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Next generation catalogs for libraries
> [mailto:NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU] On Behalf Of Kristin Antelman
> Sent: Tuesday, May 08, 2007 4:30 PM
> To: NGC4LIB_at_LISTSERV.ND.EDU
> Subject: Re: [NGC4LIB] Yes but
>
> Casey,
>
> You're right that exposing subject vocabulary in facets can lead users
> to the correct vocabulary, but in the current faceted catalogs it's hit
> or miss on recall using that link to the correct term, because your
> initial retrieval set was created from a keyword search. At NCSU, we
> call this the "revolutionary war" problem (user searches "revolutionary
> war" while correct heading is "United States--History--Revolution,
> 1775-1783").
>
> Your example, sociology of education, demonstrates the problem. In our
> catalog, a keyword search on that term gives 861 hits, and the facet
> linking to the correct term, educational sociology, has 388 hits. If
> you look in our LCSH browse index, however, you will find 618 items with
> the heading "educational sociology" and its associated 81 subheadings.
> So the keyword searcher is not seeing 230 items with the exact heading
> they were searching for.
>
> What we need is a link from the user's keyword search to a
> keyword-in-subject phrase search on the correct heading. You can
> simulate that in our catalog by searching "educational sociology" as a
> keyword-in-subject search, where you will get all 618 items-- with
> facets available for futher refinement. If we could do this, the user
> experience (apart from the issue of not knowing the vocabulary to enter
> the LCSH Browse world) would be much better than having to page through
> 5 screens of 82 subheadings of "educational sociology" in the Browse
> index. We are looking at several approaches to using the cross
> references in the authority files to accomplish this.
>
> Of course, this problem is not a problem with faceted navigation, but of
> keyword searching. The faceted navigation interface does, I think, lead
> to a false sense that the catalog is making the connection between
> keyword and controlled searching, when in many cases it's very much a
> partial connection. (e.g., The lost recall for a user in our catalog
> searching "causes of the revolutionary war" is over 99%: 3 hits starting
> w/kw search and navigating to the correct heading vs. 388 books w/the
> correct heading).
>
> -Kristin
>
> Casey Bisson wrote:
>
>> 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
>>
>
> --
> ________________________________________
> Kristin Antelman
> Associate Director for the Digital Library
> NCSU Libraries
> Box 7111
> Raleigh, NC 27696-7111
> (919) 515-7188 Fax (919) 515-3628
>
>
--
Jonathan Rochkind
Sr. Programmer/Analyst
The Sheridan Libraries
Johns Hopkins University
410.516.8886
rochkind (at) jhu.edu
Received on Wed May 09 2007 - 11:59:36 EDT