Friday, July 30, 2010

Controlled Vocabularies

Here I am whining about controlled vocabularies and subject headings and my favorite website, ravelry.com, just reworked all their patterns to make searching more efficient and guess what? They worked out a controlled vocabulary to describe the patterns available.

Socks are no longer socks, they are now "Accessories - Feet / Legs - Socks - Mid-calf. " What is even more amazing is that almost 160,000 patterns were reclassified by volunteers in one week. A very narrow set of items such as knitting patterns would be easier to classify than books which often cover a large variety of subjects per volume.

Which brings me to a topic I hinted at last post. I have fought for the past eight weeks with subject searches in the library catalog. They either aren't accurate or they are too broad to be effective. For example the heading 'Registers of Birth, etc'. should not be a subject heading for a census transcript. A census is a snapshot of the country at a specific date. Nothing about births included. On the other hand "Cemeteries - United States" is too broad for a handbook on cemeteries and cemetery research.

Subject headings can be effective when conducting meta searches like the metalib search engine at the Kentucky Virtual Library. A keyword search returns so many results across so many databases that it is totally ineffective.

I wonder what the library profession will look like in another decade?

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