[Sigcr-l] Questions for the year of cataloging research: #1 Does an LCSH subdivided heading have a meaning

[Dagobert Soergel]

Leonard has it exactly right.

DS

At 3/22/2010 07:49 AM, Leonard Will wrote:
>On 2010-03-06 17:27, Simon Spero wrote:
> > Here are some research questions that I think may be important
> >
> > *Subject Headings (LCSH and others)*
> >
> > Does a subdivided subject heading have a*meaning*? The results  in
> > Drabenstott (1998) appear to show that that roughly 50% of their chosen
> > subject headings could not be correctly paraphrased, even by technical
> > services librarians, let alone adult or children patrons.  The study has
> > methodological flaws, as discussed in the report itself.  The scoring
> > mechanism and sample selection may have introduced some bias factors.  The
> > paraphrase task may not have been an accurate measure of comprehension by
> > patrons, or composition by cataloguers.  Because pre-coordinated subject
> > heading strings are sequences of noun phrases, psycholingustic studies such
> > as Gleitman and Gleitman (1971) may be suggestive.
> > Unless speaker and hearer have the same understandings of the phrase
> > strings, then subdividing headings as currently practiced may be futile.
> >
>On reading this it occurs to me that another aspect has not been considered:
>
>As well as expressing a compound subject, an important role of
>pre-coordinated subject identifiers, whether as alphabetical subject
>headings or categories of a classification scheme, is to present a
>listing of resources in a useful order for browsing and navigation.
>Someone entering a subject catalogue should find related material
>together, organised in a logical and helpful order, so that they can
>gain an overview of the subject field and broaden or narrow their search
>as appropriate.
>
>Thus subject headings should not be viewed and interpreted in isolation,
>but in the context of adjacent headings. This makes it easier to see
>what citation order of facets has been adopted and to interpret them
>accordingly.
>
>I know that classified catalogues have never been popular in the USA as
>an information retrieval tool, but I think that they have an important
>role to play in providing a map of a subject area. Pre-coordinated
>subject headings go some way in this direction. Classification schemes
>are being re-discovered in web applications under the guise of "taxonomies".
>
>Leonard Will
>
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Dagobert Soergel
Professor and Chair
Department of Library and Information Studies
Graduate School of Education
University at Buffalo
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