On the Subject of Subjects
Subject cataloging has apparently been a hot debate topic among librarians for centuries. Some believe that people know what they are looking for and there is no need to have works sorted by subject, while others claim that most people only know that they need a book on a particular subject with no specific title in mind. Studies have shown that searching by subject in online catalogs has decreased over time with patrons instead favoring keyword searches.Keyword searches are very similar to subject searches, but keywords give you a little more wiggle room with what you're searching for, where subject searches require specific and certain terms to be searched or controlled vocabulary. Keywords are somewhat like today's Instagram hashtags in my opinion. If you were looking for a non-fiction book about zombies and searched zombies in a keyword search, you'd get tons of results because those results were tagged with "Zombie" as a keyword. If you were to do the same term as a subject search though, you might not get any results because the subject about zombies may be considered "Haitian Folklore", but because that wasn't the exact term we searched for, we didn't get any results. The problem with keyword searches is that these searches are typically too broad and can give too many results of varying quality. Keywords may also be taken from words that have multiple meaning and bring up completely irrelevant search results.
Beginning in 1992, to make subject searches easier, The Library of Congress, OCLC, and Research Library Group teamed together to standardize how subjects are cataloged. These groups created what it called a Core Record that has all kinds of rules on what can be in it and has a code so that people can know what they're reading, similar to a MARC record. For monographs, each Core Record is required to have a classification number recognized by USMARC as well as at least two subject headings from an established thesaurus and also recognized by USMARC.
Those opposed to Core Records say that it makes sense to go through the effort of classifying physical items and grouping them on shelves by subject, but with electronic records, what is the point? Classifying records by subject can allow records to be related to each other and can be used to link terms across thesauri. I would think that this means that if you search "Haitian Folklore" as a subject, you will also come across "Haitian Mythology" because "mythology" and "folklore" are synonyms and the database would use a thesaurus to find these synonyms. With keywords, this would become way too chaotic and give way too many search results.
I personally like keyword searches. In my experience, when using my library's OPAC, keyword gives the best results and the item I'm looking for are usually at the top. I would say I use keyword searches 85% of the time, otherwise using author or title searches. I don't think I've ever used subject search. When I search "sewing" in keyword search, I get all of the results I'm looking for. I can see how keyword searches may be less useful in databases containing journal articles like EBSCO or PsychInfo because there are typically more keywords per record than library OPAC's.
Reference
Taylor, A. (1995). On the subject of subjects. Journal of Academic Librarianship 21:484-91.
No comments:
Post a Comment