Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse

Authority Control Meets Faceted Browse, ALCTS Authority Control IG, June 24, 2007

PowerPoints available at the authority control interest group LITA/ALCTS

 

Kathryn LaBarre,
Science
University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champaignklabarre@uiuc.edu

Concept of bringing search and browsing together. We are in the period of experimentation: metadata standards, web 2.0, folksonomy, leverage, and facets.

Look to interconnections available with authority data. Authority data is a conceptual map. S.R. Ranganthan discussed the dynamic theory of classification. He has a set of normative principles.

 

Facet – information can be assigned to multiple dimensions. The speaker explained the technique of facet analysis. An example was done with Buildings and some potential facets include location, composition, purpose, style, date constructed, and associated persons. Every subject area has its own possibilities for categories. She listed many examples of prior art. We need to examine assumptions: how to support searching/browsing, user tasks, user behavior, and things vs. subjects. She continued by going through some examples of opacs and the facets to refine searches – authors, series, topics, branches, and titles. An example using the Aquabrowser is Queens Library. They use format, author, subject, language, series, corporation, etc. Western North Carolina Library Network uses classification numbers to refine the searches to see what is near by.

 

Charley Pennell, NCSU Libraries, Charley.pennell@gmail.com

View the Endeca product at his library. We have been able to do filters for quite some time. We are now using technology that has been used by commercial enterprises. It mines metadata already available via MARC record. It re-indexes over night. This process did demand a cleanup of the 6XX subdivisions. It allows for both pre- and post-coordinate limits. Hierarchical data enables drilling down through call number results. He shared statistics about searches using facets. Things he has learned from the project: a single facet need not represent data from a single field. Author facet is less useful in some types of searches than others. Some users haven’t figured out breadcrumbs.

 

Endeca and Authority control – to make use of available metadata, subjects were split along subdivisions. Authors were not. Problems include wrong delimiter values, hierarchy, context (one way relationship broken, devoid of geographic context, phrase headings expressed in multiple subdivisions, and scope-match cataloging vs. keyword).

Solutions may include FAST, search behavior education, and Web 2 cross referencing to redirect searches. Future directions include additional hierarchies, use of cross reference structure, massage underlying metadata and accommodation of true browse for all indexes.

 

Mary Charles Lasater,

Vanderbilt
University Libraries

Primo implementation. I apologize she spoke quickly and I was unable to keep up.

Facets include topic, creator, collection, creation date, resource type, language, genre, and classification LCC. With TV News you only get two facets – creator and creation date.

Primo allows much better access to the patrons. Another search had topic, creator, collection, creation date and resource type as the facets. She demonstrated how some of the searches were not as successful as others. She discussed some of the authority control/maintenance issues. We need to reconsider our NACO practices. Authority control, maintenance and consistency are important.

 

Casey Bisson, Plymouth State University, http://MaisonBisson.com

Casey is a programmer, not a librarian. Scriblio is an open source product. Development has been easy. He is not doing as much faceting as he is doing clustering. He is taking the information from the MARC record. He demonstrated a number of searches showing the search and browse hits. He showed clusters by subject and author. He did not show but it is built with comments and user tag ability.

 

Question and Answer Session occurred followed by a interest group meeting.