[Sigia-l] taxonomy for the field of American Studies/digital object types

[Leslie Johnston]

All,

Is anyone aware of any work going on with taxonomy development for the 
field of American Studies?  We're developing our American Studies 
Information Community (part portal to lists of resources at UVa and 
elsewhere, part directory of people, part discussion fora) and we're 
looking for models for the classification and organization of our 
resources.  Part of the access will be person based (such as a dynamically 
generated pathfinder for Edgar Allen Poe leading to images, TEI files 
[fiction, letters, critical material], EAD finding aids, and web sites), 
but we would like the higher-level organization to be more thematic, and 
we're looking for suggestions for a reasonably simple taxonomy.  We need to 
categorize our digital object types, too.

There is an simple breakdown on a site at Rutgers that's very appealing:

http://www.libraries.rutgers.edu/rul/rr_gateway/research_guides/history/texts_by_subject.shtml

But we're wondering if more formal work has taken place anywhere.

Thanks in advance,
Leslie

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Leslie Johnston
Director, Digital Services Integration
University of Virginia Library
johnston at virginia.edu