Kay,
Thanks for your careful reading of Karen Calhoun's report to LC and the
other documents. I was probably suffering from a case of wishful
thinking.
There is much promise in Karen's bullet "Explore new ways to manage
vocabulary for the names of places." Just imagine if instead of AACR's
abbreviated larger place name qualifiers or the LCSH indirect
subdivision, we had access to the place-name hierarchy in the Thesaurus
of Geographic Names (one of the Getty vocabularies).
Meanwhile, I'll also dream about buildings and artist groups in LC/NAF.
Sherman Clarke, NYU Libraries - [log in to unmask]
----- Original Message -----
From: Kay Teel <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Friday, May 12, 2006 12:34 pm
Subject: Re: [ARLIS-L] FW: The End of LCSH? (from LJ Academic Newswire)
> 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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__________________________________________________________________
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For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
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