Book People Archive

Re: LC Convenes Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic

J Flenner wrote:
> LC Convenes Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control
> 
> Subject Headings or Keywords? Google, Microsoft Join LC Working Group on 
> Bibliographic Control 
> <http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6397827.html&>

As it happens, I gave a talk at CNI in Washington last week along similar
lines, and included a demo of the new subject map browsing tools that were
introduced into The Online Books Page a few months back. (I also showed a
demo of the same tools mapping the entire Penn library collection.)  Some
LC folks were in the audience.

I don't know for sure what the future of subject-based bibliographic search
will look like.  But I'd hate to see a potentially useful subject description
mechanism (and one that libraries have put over 100 years of work into)
thrown overboard prematurely just because the tools that libraries have
provided to work with it have been so bad.  The mail I've been getting
since I introduced LCSH-based subject maps into the Online Books Page
collection indicates to me that people are using them, and managing to
go deeper into the collection than they have been previously.  (This
isn't based on controlled studies at this point, but the trends in
"bad link" reports and other feedback give me this general impression.)
And most people I've shown the maps to have seen them as a big step up
from the strictly alphabetic-browsing-of-subject-terms that most library
OPACs leave you stuck with.

If anyone's interested in learning more, they can find more information
about what we're doing with subject maps, including demos, a white paper,
and slides from my Washington talk, at

   http://labs.library.upenn.edu/subjectmaps/

On The Online Books Page collection, the majority of nonfiction books,
and some of the fiction books, now have detailed Library of Congress
subject indexing.  Most of the other books have at least one automatically
assigned LC subject heading, though the auto-assigned headings may be
less precise and detailed than ones that have been explicitly assigned
by catalogers.  We're continuing to fill in more subject details on the
books already in the collection, and adding them to all our new listings,
and I'm happy to hear feedback and suggestions from readers.

John