[dlpdev] Keywords etc.and April 9th

[Fabian Tompsett]

Firstly are we still meeting on April 9th?

We are having a Larc Antisystemic library on Wednesday 31st where we could discuss who will go etc. But it would be good to know where etc. We shall probably have a car load hopefully including Saul from limehouse Town Hall.

I agree that the way books are put on the shelves is something to be dedided at the individual library level. Indeed I shall be proposing that we create a spoecific section about Yugoslavia and the Balkans in preparation for the Belgrade PGA conference. So certain material may be garneerd for a specific purpose and the repositioned as other priorities come to the fore.

As for the LCSH, there was some discussion about this at the Black and Asian Archives Working Party, with eventually a move to the Unesco Theasaurus. Carol Dixon wrote an excellent piece on this (see http://www.casbah.ac.uk/IndexingMay2002.doc). After comparing:

 Humanities and Social Sciences Electronic Thesaurus (HASSET)
 Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
 OECD Macrothesaurus
 UNESCO Thesaurus

she ended favouring UNESCO

"In general the consultations revealed that use of LCSH was favoured by librarians, and the UNESCO Thesaurus by archivists."

...

"Findings from this test tended to favour the use of the UNESCO Thesaurus, primarily because within LCSH terms relating to both the Caribbean and Black and Asian history tended to be too general and it was feared this could lead to lack of specificity in the number of relevant 'hits' retrieved from the CASBAH dataset when searched by end users. In addition, a greater number of inconsistencies arose in the application of LCSH compared to use of terms from the UNESCO Thesaurus when different members of the CASBAH team compared their index entries. It was also projected that the composite subject headings that often develop when applying LCSH would be cumbersome to present via the CASBAH database's user interface."

I have also received an e-mail concerning "multi-hierarchical cataloguing" which I haven't looked at and cannot find just at the moment. But I think this is what we might call non-hierachical cataloguing but I hope to know more soon.

At Larc we have not used the dlp cataloguing system as it stands, simpliny putting in everything as 'other'. The big question for me is, can we continue with that, or do we need to to develop something different?

I think we need something different (but I have not got my head round programming) because:

a) as Ellie said, it refers to editions, whereas we want to introduce accession numbers to undividual copies. The facility of developing your own lists is limited to books in the system you log onto.

b) it seems that there can then be something quite different which perhaps could be developed from the existing software which deals with texts and editions etc.

c) It would make sense for publishers to function like any other list. So, when books have their publisher entered, this amounts to having a link to the publisher, which would not only have details about them but also a list of books they have published. While with more high profile publishers this could simply be a link to their website, for other publishers - particularly obscure radical publishers - it may be very useful to know what else they have put out even if it does not directly relate subject wise.

Jo Walsh did some stuff around RDF about the relationship "is a copy of" which could be used to link acquisitions with editions. Then there further needs to be something which links different editions of a text, handles anthologies, journals and magazines. And ideally we would have a seamless cross over into archive material as well.

I hope that we can see our way through this soon (ideally a meeting on the 9th) so that we can get to work on it. I'll be back to working part-time this week, and I want to get my head around RDF - and indeed we intend to have a group working on this in London. I feel it would useful to have different teams working on different areas, coming together periodically to deal with common issues.

Also we shall be proposing the distributed library project at the Belgrade PGA meeting. It would be good to have something clearer to go forward with. If we can sort out what's happening soon, then we should have made soem progress by July and be able to present a much more coherent proposal.

Anyway I hope we meet up soon.

Fabian

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