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The use and limitations of variable costs in predicting the financial effects of changing workloads in clinical chemistry are illustrated and discussed. The study identified the 10 tests with the highest annual variable expenditure in clinical chemistry laboratories of a district general hos‐pital and a teaching hospital. Six tests were common to both laboratories. The differences were due to the demands of specialised depart‐ments on the laboratory in the teaching hospital. In the laboratories studied, a very small group of commonly requested inexpensive tests (blood gases, plasma glucose, creatinine, urea, sodium and potassium) accounted for a large proportion (36–54 per cent) of the variable expenditure. Establishing glucose, the test with the highest variable expenditure, as a discretionary test in the district general hospital decreased the total number of tests by 6.9 per cent but revenue expenditure fell by only 1 per cent. However, efforts to save money by reducing workload would be most productive if directed at tests with a high variable expenditure.

This paper puts forward a MARC-based semiautomated approach to extracting semantically rich subject facets from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies for display in topic-oriented faceted catalog interfaces in a way that would better support users' exploratory search tasks.

Hierarchical faceted subject metadata is extracted from general and/or specialized controlled vocabularies by using standard client/server communication protocols. Rigorous facet analysis, classification and linguistic principles are applied on top of that to ensure faceting accuracy and consistency.

A shallow application of facet analysis and classification, together with poorly organized displays, is one of the major barriers to effective faceted navigation in library, archive and museum catalogs.

This paper does not deal with Web-scale discovery services.

This paper offers suggestions that can be used by the technical services departments of libraries, archives and museums in designing and developing more powerful exploratory search interfaces.

This paper addresses the problem of deriving clearly delineated topical facets from existing metadata for display in a user-friendly, high-level topical overview that is meant to encourage a multidimensional exploration of local collections as well as “learning by browsing.”