Dear Carl
I was interested in your email: the electronic environment does
indeed make it possible to link subject indexing terms in complex
hierarchical relationships which are difficult to maintain on paper. I
think the answer is yes, this is already being done, and yes, you are
slightly in danger of re-inventing the wheel (though that can be a lot
of fun too!).
There are a number of existing thesauri which might help you in
what you're doing. I'm most familiar with the UNESCO Thesaurus
(available on-line at http://www.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/), which we use
for indexing at the UK National Digital Archive of Datasets. It's also
been adopted by some of the archive networking projects (among
them A2A, AIM25 and CASBAH). I appreciate that what you're
trying to do is convert an existing legacy index. One approach
might be to try to map your terms into UNESCO. Where you don't
find exact matches (UNESCO tends to be rather 'high level'), you
might be able to add your terms to the structure of the Thesaurus as
narrower terms of UNESCO terms. Or establish preferred term -
non-preferred term relationships between your terms and UNESCO
terms which express equivalent concepts.
UNESCO is available electronically, both on the web (see above)
and from some of the cataloguing software suppliers. DS Ltd has
been given the data for the Thesaurus, and has permission from
UNESCO to supply it to customers who will be using it for non-profit
making purposes. I don't know how much progress they've made in
intergrating UNESCO data into CALM, i.e. whether they're at the
stage where they can supply it ready loaded to any customer who
asks for it.
Peter Garrod
On 18 Apr 2002, at 15:29, Boardman, Carl - Cultural Services wrote:
> Setting up CALM in Oxfordshire R O, we've reached the point of putting the
> subject index into the authority file. This is, of course, a useful time to
> check that it still hangs together, and while doing so a thought occurred.
> To put it slightly pretentiously, while written on cards our subject index
> has always worked in two dimensions, but suddenly we have the chance to
> change it to three dimensions. The index is a set of terms, arranged
> alphabetically, with cross-references between them, telling searchers to
> "see also" other related terms - in other words, to move sideways into a
> related area. In the electronic arena we can make hierarchies of terms, so
> that for example a head term might be "Music", under which come
> "Composition", "Performance", "Instruments", etc, under the last of which
> come "Violin", "Piano", and so forth. The account book of a set of piano
> manufacturers goes under "Piano", which then picks up all the terms to the
> top of the strand: "Instruments", "Music" - so that whatever level a
> searcher goes for, everything of relevance will turn up. And so that if they
> can't find a term they're searching, all they need do is go in further up
> the strand and fine down through the subgroups.
>
> No rocket science there - but has anyone ever actually done it in a county
> record office context? To proceed this way will involve defining all the
> head terms (Generics, we're calling them at present), working out the
> Sub-Generics, deciding what Specifics come under them, and so on. Perhaps
> "Music" isn't a Generic; perhaps that's "Arts" and "Music" is just the Sub.
> We've no wish to reinvent the wheel. Does anyone have a functioning subject
> index which works that way, or has anyone tried it and found it simply
> doesn't work?
>
> Carl Boardman
> Oxfordshire Record Office
>
> Oxfordshire Record Office is a section of Cultural Services in Oxfordshire
> County Council. This message is intended only for the addressee, and OCC can
> take no responsibility for the accuracy of the information contained
> therein, nor should the message be held as having any legal validity.
>
Peter Garrod ([log in to unmask])
Archivist
UK National Digital Archive of Datasets (http://ndad.ulcc.ac.uk/)
University of London Computer Centre, 20 Guilford Street,
London WC1N 1DZ, UK
Tel: +44 20 7692 1353
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