On Thu, 11 May 2006 09:16:29 -0400 Sherman Clarke wrote:
>I'm not sure she's said it exactly but I think Karen's point is that
>LCSH is more complex than it needs to be. The FAST (Faceted Application
>of Subject Terminology) research project at OCLC is looking at how LCSH
>could be separated into its constituent parts (topic, geography,
>chronology, genre/form).
The Calhoun report
<http://www.loc.gov/catdir/calhoun-report-final.pdf> has a bullet
point on p. 14, in the "extend" pyramid: "Simplify cataloging
practice to a set of basic elements; eliminate LCSH".
Then, in her blueprint for libraries to follow over the next two
years, she urges on p. 17-18 "Support browsing and collocation" and
includes these strategies:
* "Abandon the attempt to do comprehensive subject analysis manually
with LCSH in favor of subject keywords; urge LC to dismantle LCSH";
* "Encourage research and development in automatic subject analysis,
including ways to reuse legacy data containing LCSH headings to
support automatic subject analysis";
* "Explore new ways to manage vocabulary for the names of places";
* "Encourage the review of developments in other disciplines on
ontologies and taxonomies and their application to library catalogs".
On p. 33, she details her expert interviewees' opinions on LCSH
("There were no strong endorsements for LCSH") -- in summary, they
felt keyword searching and table-of-contents can replace LCSH.
In her endnotes, she cites a preprint article by Adam Chandler and
Jim LeBlanc about an experiment to create subject browse categories
using the Hierarchical Interface to LC Classification:
http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/2223. She also cites
the Tina Gross and Arlene Taylor 2005 article that found that more
than a third of successful keyword searches had pulled words from
subject headings, and notes other studies that studied the results of
providing table-of-contents.
Calhoun doesn't mention OCLC's FAST project at all, and my
interpretation of her recommendations is that she is urging the
abandonment of any and all versions of LCSH, including FAST, because
it's not an automated process.
>The point is that controlling the words is
>important and helpful to the end user;
I don't think Calhoun agrees with this. She is not urging replacing
one controlled vocabulary (LCSH) with another, easier one, but
instead urging the use of uncontrolled sources of terms such as
tables of contents. The only place I find a reference to continuing
and expanding a controlled vocabulary is "Continue and expand
participation in name authority control cooperative programs."
Another relevant Web resource:
"Rethinking How We Provide Bibliographic Services for the University
of California" by the U.C. Bibliographic Services Task Force (2006):
http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf
On p. 5, section III.2., U.C. lists recommendations for metadata, and
also urged abandoning the use of controlled vocabularies (LCSH, MESH)
for topical subjects in favor of tables of contents and "indexes"
(I'm not clear on what kind of indexes they mean) becoming
"surrogates" for subject headings and classification. However, unlike
the Calhoun report, the U.C. report mentions allocating resources for
descriptive and subject metadata to non-textual items such as images,
music, and numeric databases. Pages 23-24 give more detail about
these recommendations. The U.C. report mentions OCLC's FAST syntax as
a promising alternative to applying the full structure of LCSH.
As a cataloger, I have to agree that LCSH is byzantine, too complex,
very hard to learn, very hard to train catalogers to use (and forget
about training non-catalogers to understand it), and legalistically,
of not capriciously, designed (any cataloger who receives the notices
of the LCSH editorial team's decisions will see this in action).
However, it is a large and cross-disciplinary controlled vocabulary,
and in my opinion, its cross-disciplinary nature is its chief (and
only??) virtue. I haven't been won over by the idea of eliminating
controlled subject vocabularies yet, and I haven't yet seen what
machines can do to apply subject analysis of books (especially
non-English books) without human intervention of some kind.
I feel that art catalogers should be thinking seriously about what
kinds of subject access are appropriate to our disciplines, what can
be provided automatically or by vendors, how can existing LCSH be
exploited in new ways that help us, and what art book cataloging will
look like without LCSH. (My gut feeling is that LCSH will be next on
the chopping block, because it's enormously expensive for LC to
produce and maintain. But looking on the bright side, perhaps the
demise of LCSH will enable artists' groups and named buildings to be
established in the name authority file.)
Kay Teel
Cataloger, Stanford University Libraries
Stanford, California
Definitely *not* speaking for my institution.
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