Defining Usefulness and Facilitating Access Based on Research Applications

Defining Usefulness and Facilitating Access Based on Research Applications Presented at “Subject Access: Unlimited Opportunities” IFLA 2016 Classification & Indexing Satellite Meeting 11 August 2016, Columbus, Ohio

@AllisonJaiODell Metadata Librarian, University of Florida

Aboutness The textbook is about biology

Ofness Photograph of a laboratory, is also about biology

Sara Shatford, “Analyzing the Subject of a Picture: A Theoretical Approach,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1986): 39-62; Layne, Sara Shatford, “Some Issues in the Indexing of Images,” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 45, no. 8 (1994): 583-588. CCO’s “Representational Subject” Cataloging Cultural Objects: A Guide to Describing Cultural Works and their Images (Chicago: American Library Association, 2006), 219-221.

Isness Certificate of title inferred to be about a property Jackie M. Dooley and Helena Zinkham, “The Object as ‘Subject’: Providing Access to Genres, Forms of Material, and Physical Characteristics,” In Toni Petersen & Pat Molholt, eds., Beyond the Book: Extending MARC for Subject Access (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1990). Genre/Form Indexing: •  Library of Congress Genre/

Form Terms •  Art & Architecture Thesaurus •  RBMS Controlled Vocabularies

USEFULNESS relates resources to research applications

School records Useful “to answer demographic questions about immigration, family-size, or life expectancy” David Bearman, “Authority Control: Issues and Prospects,” The American Archivist, 52, no. 3 (Summer 1989): 289.

“‘Good’ indexing must faithfully represent the topics of a document, while taking into account the potential use of the document by different users.” Snunith Shoham and Rochelle Kedar, “The Subject Cataloging of Monographs with the Use of Keywords,” Cataloging & Classification Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2002): 32.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar In a school library, useful to teach and learn counting In an art library, useful to study paste papers, layout, and design

Homer’s Odyssey In an academic library, useful to study ancient Mediterranean culture and literature In a textile library, useful to study ancient weaving practice

#SORRYNOTSORRY Yes, I am going to talk about hashtags.

CATALOGING & ANALYZING USEFULNESS

•  Abstracts highlight the value of the material to the user

•  API- and crowd-sourced reviews speak to personal, discipline-specific applications

•  Index disciplines, methodologies, and research interests, with appropriate mark-up:

–  MARC 658, “Curriculum objective”

–  MODS <subject> @displayLabel

–  EAD <subject> @localType

–  VRA Core <subject> @type

•  Social tagging for timely, audience-appropriate, context-specific indexing

•  Semantic reasoning to re-analyze existing metadata

FACILITATING ACCESS BASED ON RESEARCH APPLICATIONS abstracting, indexing, and encoding techniques discovery interface design @AllisonJaiODell Metadata Librarian, University of Florida