The Working Group's report at:
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/lcwg-ontherecord-jan08-final.pd
f
came up with the recommendation (p. 35):
4.3.2 Pursue De-Coupling of Subject Strings
4.3.2.1 LC: Work with appropriate partners on ways to take advantage of the
power of the controlled vocabulary in LCSH, LCC, and DDC. Describe or
identify products or schemes that could take advantage of those
terminologies in a more accessible environment with broader audiences.
4.3.2.2 All: Evaluate the ability of LCSH to support faceted browsing and
discovery.
and LC's response says that they support it:
http://www.loc.gov/bibliographic-future/news/LCWGResponse-Marcum-Final-06100
8.pdf (p. 62).
Everybody appears to want controlled vocabularies, and this shouldn't be a
surprise since practically everybody involved in this effort is a librarian.
They all want the controlled vocabularies to be more easily utilized, and
they are suggesting some ways of doing it. Although I have written strongly
about the problems with the subject strings, I still believe that
de-coupling the subject strings would be regrettable at this time because I
have the feeling that with the new tools at our disposal, the strings could
become more useful than they have been in years. "Groupings" and
"subgrouping" are now considered important, see e.g. the tool Vivisimo. But
I still think de-coupling will be inevitable sooner or later, and arguing
against it would be fighting a losing battle.
On the other hand, the Working Group and LC's response don't touch on one
aspect of subject usage that people complain about the most (at least to me)
and is the reason why Google book searches are becoming so popular. I always
tell my users about it. See the excellent article in LJ at:
http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6566451.html, which concludes that
Google Book searches are in many ways superior to library catalog searches.
Essentially, I think this stems from the concepts of specificity and
exhaustivity from traditional subject cataloging practice. Currently,
catalogers analyse down to 20% of an item, but I think users are expecting
much more than this. Many of my users are very happy with 5 or 6 pages from
a book, but you can't find this through the catalog. Yet, they can often
find it with a Google Book search and then go to the book on the shelf if we
have it, or the link into the scan may be good enough. Although this is nice
and handy and users like it a lot, I have problems with it since I know that
since they are bypassing any authority controlled tools, they are missing a
lot.
The argument that this just enhances the entire experience and everything
therefore is great worries me about user perceptions of the library catalog,
which they see has definitely failed them in this case. Can anything be
done?
I've been labelled a dreamer, and this may be true, but so long as I am
dreaming, I want to point out that we do have coworkers in this field: i.e.
the book indexers, who analyse much father down than we do. *If* we could
get other communities to use our (reworked) subjects, using URIs as it was
suggested in the Working Group report and has been accepted by LC (they
exist now at: http://lcsh.info/) why couldn't book indexers fit into this
scheme as well?
Just dreaming...
Jim Weinheimer
James Weinheimer j.weinheimer_at_aur.edu
Director of Library and Information Services
The American University of Rome
via Pietro Roselli, 4
00153 Rome, Italy
voice- 011 39 06 58330919 ext. 327
fax-011 39 06 58330992
> Hi all,
>
> I have been out of the loop for a little while here, and would greatly
> appreciate it if anyone could point me to where I can bring myself up to
> date with the current state of play with the debate over controlled
> vocabularies for subjects, please. I recall some time back a fierce debate
> raging over the future of the LCSH. Has that been resolved yet? If not, is
> there a best place to search archives? Other sites? for a catch up?
>
> Many thanks,
> Neil Godfrey
>
> http://metalogger.wordpress.com
Received on Wed Jun 25 2008 - 07:15:52 EDT