Navigating bibs with subject headings

Karen Schneider stimulated lots of discussion with her post to the TechSource blog on the Maricopa (AZ) County Library District’s use of shelf labels derived from BISAC codes. Many commenters debate the relative merit of organization systems of the bookstore chains and libraries. I was most interested in Karen’s comments regarding use of Library of Congress Subject Headings in navigating OPACs or Web collections because the issue has come up in the development of Guide to Reference.

In developing Guide to Reference’s product concept, editors saw a value in using Library of Congress Subject Headings as an index to the entries. When NCSU’s Endeca catalog took the library world by storm, we considered using the subject heading for faceted browsing. We came to the conclusion that a few obstacles made it impractical, at least for our launch version. Most prominently, whereas we could use MARC to gather subject heads for print, Guide to Reference will also include Internet resources, most of which would lack LC Subject Headings. Instead, we decided that the subject assignments within the Guide to Reference taxonomy, a sources place in the reference landscape, would be sufficient for our users.

In describing the work of Jesse Haro of the Phoenix Public Library, Karen Schneider asserts that neither LC Subject Headings or Dewey is suitable for Web record sets.

However, Haro encountered a problem I discussed in an earlier article about NCSU’s implementation of Endeca. I commented that while adding facets (guided navigation) to the OPAC was a huge plus, in the end, the usefulness of the facets was limited by the browsing language used to generate them, and I added that Library of Congress Subject Headings are “not designed for browsing collections on the Web.”

John Blyberg noted in a comment that Karen hit the nail on the head with these words.

Pouring a nineteenth-century inventory system into a twenty-first-century search engine can lead to–shall we say–interesting results. Haro comments that “Endeca exposed our catalog in ways that were for better and for worse.” Once of the “worse” ways was the clunkyness of library-generated metadata for topic browsing.

Karen considers the BISAC codes to be superior and calls them “pragmatically user centric.” Booklist Online uses BISAC for its subject organization and cross-referencing.