A pressing problem confronted by Information Organization practitioners is subject access of the OPAC. Keyword searches often lead to either failure or retrieving too many references. When searches yield zero hits, whatever the reason, many users will abandon the search. This is not a function of computer literacy. The OPAC is a black box to users and they know very little about what happens inside the system… and they shouldn’t need to. This is why post patrons prefer “free-text” searching, because it requires little thought – however it produces less intelligent results. Ranganathan’s law, “Save the time of the reader,” is applicable here. It is the responsibility of those of us organizing information to allow the searcher to find his information accurately in a little time as possible.
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TheSource Newsletter, Susan Roby Berdinka. Susan Roby Berdinka said: http://susanrb.wordpress.com/2010/04/28/subject-access-the-opac Subject Access of the #Library #OPAC #library30 #semantic_web #cataloging [...]
By: Tweets that mention A Solution to Subject Access of the Library OPAC « Thoughts on Technical Librarianship -- Topsy.com on April 29, 2010
at 1:43 am
Susan, I liked this post very much.
I haven’t yet King and Reinhold, but it sounds like what’s proposed is to add a layer between authority records and the “natural language” that translates the controlled vocabulary of subject headings to something that is semantically receptive?
By: Jennifer Parsons on April 29, 2010
at 1:56 pm
There are two layers that I believe need to be added between the authority records and the patron’s natural language. One is to program a user interface to interpret the patron’s natural language. The other is an ontology.
I hope you can obtain a copy of the book. What King and Reinhold propose is creating an ontology layer between the authority records and the user interface. An ontology defines classes, sets, attributes, and relations of the domain – in this case the LC Subject Headings. Also, it includes synonyms of the members of the domain. Given the size of the LC Subject Headings, this is certainly not a trivial project.
The user interface would need to be programmed more intelligently in order to do more than perform the brute queries that are typical of an OPAC. There has been a lot of research on natural language processing in the computer science field using a number of programming languages.
Thanks for your comment!
By: susan on April 29, 2010
at 6:14 pm
[...] } As I stated in my article A Solution to Subject Access of the Library OPAC, it is the responsibility of those of us organizing information to allow the searcher to find his [...]
By: Findability and the Library OPAC « Thoughts on Technical Librarianship on June 14, 2010
at 10:06 pm
[...] to make the OPAC more user friendly, as I have discussed in my last two articles on findability and subject access: Basic Flow for OPAC [...]
By: Layers of the OPAC in a Nutshell « Thoughts on Technical Librarianship on August 11, 2010
at 10:44 pm