High‐Level Subject Access Tools and Techniques in Internet Cataloging

Citation

Bowman, J.H. (2004), "High‐Level Subject Access Tools and Techniques in Internet Cataloging", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 38 No. 1, pp. 75-76. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330410519224

This book is one of the Haworth Press’s many “separates”, the content of an issue of the Journal of Internet Cataloging. Its six chapters all arise from the development of recent years, whereby libraries have started to construct gateways to online resources. Most of these have begun as lists, manually constructed, and the various writers here look at projects which have tried to automate this process to some extent. These lists of broad topics are usually referred to as high‐level subject displays.

In the first chapter Diana Vizine‐Goetz revisits the question of using library classification schemes to provide access to Internet resources. She compares the numbers of items likely to appear at the different levels of hierarchy in Dewey and Yahoo! One problem here is that because of the unbalanced nature of Dewey’s notation some major topics have longer numbers than others, meaning that these need to be “elevated” up the hierarchy to give them more weight. A shortcoming is that she does not discuss how this is to be achieved without excessive manual intervention.

The second paper, by Stephen Paul Davis, is the longest in the book, and discusses a project at Columbia University which tried to make similar use of the Library of Congress Classification. A table was developed, mapping class‐numbers to vocabulary in a subject tree. All of this of course assumes that the electronic resources are catalogued in the OPAC. Next, Kathleen Forsythe and Steve Shadle describe a project at the University of Washington, where electronic resources were put into a database called Digital Registry.

Jonathan Rothman’s paper concerns a University of Michigan project, which again tries to map subject headings from LC classification numbers already in catalogue records. It takes the view that hitherto subject headings have been materials‐focused rather than user‐focused. This is an interesting idea, but on reflection it is hard to see what is meant by it. Surely if an item is about a subject it is about that subject, and the purpose to which the user wishes to put it cannot alter that fact. I found this puzzling, and it seemed to be just another example of the inadequacy of Library of Congress Subject Headings being demonstrated by their application to electronic resources.

The chapter by Keith A. Morgan and Tripp Reade is rather too full of baffling, pretentious sociological jargon to be comprehensible, especially as it contains so many non sequiturs. What, for instance, are we to make of this nonsense? “Socks are socks, pants are pants. Apples are never oranges. While one might argue that a bibliographic citation is a bibliographic citation and an electronic journal is an electronic journal, the mere possession of such material is but one step in a complex process of research and discovery”.

In the final chapter Gordon Dunsire and others describe HILT (High‐Level Thesaurus), which was a project concerned with cross‐searching and browsing in a cross‐sectoral environment, including libraries, archives, museums and electronic collections. The end of this seems inconclusive, in that there is no indication of whether the project is likely to be followed up, or of what is the way forward now.

The question I feel bound to ask after reading these contributions is this: if all these people have found traditional classification and subject headings so inadequate for cataloguing Internet resources why did they never see these inadequacies before when they were being applied chiefly to books? It should not have needed the advent of the Internet to make people realise that subject headings seldom match users’ expectations and that classification schemes are out of date and unsatisfactory for collocation. It seems a pity that so much effort is now being put into this one aspect of library cataloguing, when a broader view might be more useful.

As always with this publisher, the bibliographic citations have no consistency between chapters. The index is ludicrously inadequate, and one of the worst I have seen. Admittedly subjects like this, particularly when written about in this way, are extremely difficult to index, but if this is the best they could do they might as well not have bothered. What is the point, for example, of including references to the authors’ names in the editor’s introduction, simply because she mentions their contributions there? One wonders why the publishers decided to issue this as a separate book at all; the market for it will surely be quite small. Still, it will have its uses, both for others who are contemplating similar projects, and as a summary of the state of affairs at this time, when one looks back after they have all been overtaken by fresh developments.