Presented at the IFLA 2016 World Library and Information Conference, Classification & Indexing Section Satellite Meeting, "Subject Access: Unlimited Opportunities"

1. Defining Usefulness and
Facilitating Access Based on
Research Applications
Presented at “Subject Access: Unlimited Opportunities”
IFLA 2016 Classification & Indexing Satellite Meeting
11 August 2016, Columbus, Ohio
@AllisonJaiODell
Metadata Librarian, University of Florida

2. Aboutness
The textbook is about biology

3. Ofness
Photograph of a laboratory,
is also about biology
Sara Shatford, “Analyzing the
Subject of a Picture: A
Theoretical Approach,”
Cataloging & Classification
Quarterly 6, no. 3 (1986): 39-62;
Layne, Sara Shatford, “Some
Issues in the Indexing of
Images,” Journal of the American
Society for Information Science 45,
no. 8 (1994): 583-588.
CCO’s “Representational Subject”
Cataloging Cultural Objects: A
Guide to Describing Cultural Works
and their Images (Chicago:
American Library Association,
2006), 219-221.

4. Isness
Certificate of title inferred to be
about a property
Jackie M. Dooley and Helena
Zinkham, “The Object as
‘Subject’: Providing Access to
Genres, Forms of Material, and
Physical Characteristics,” In Toni
Petersen & Pat Molholt, eds.,
Beyond the Book: Extending MARC
for Subject Access (Boston: G.K.
Hall & Co., 1990).
Genre/Form Indexing:
• Library of Congress Genre/
Form Terms
• Art & Architecture Thesaurus
• RBMS Controlled Vocabularies

5. USEFULNESS
relates resources to research applications

6. School records
Useful “to answer demographic
questions about immigration,
family-size, or life expectancy”
David Bearman, “Authority
Control: Issues and Prospects,”
The American Archivist, 52, no. 3
(Summer 1989): 289.

7. “‘Good’ indexing must faithfully represent
the topics of a document, while taking into
account the potential use of the document
by different users.”
Snunith Shoham and Rochelle Kedar, “The Subject Cataloging
of Monographs with the Use of Keywords,” Cataloging &
Classification Quarterly 33, no. 2 (2002): 32.

8. The Very Hungry Caterpillar
In a school library, useful to
teach and learn counting
In an art library, useful to study
paste papers, layout, and design

9. Homer’s Odyssey
In an academic library, useful to
study ancient Mediterranean
culture and literature
In a textile library, useful to study
ancient weaving practice

10. #SORRYNOTSORRY
Yes, I am going to talk about hashtags.

11. CATALOGING & ANALYZING USEFULNESS
• Abstracts highlight the value of the material to the user
• API- and crowd-sourced reviews speak to personal, discipline-specific applications
• Index disciplines, methodologies, and research interests, with appropriate mark-up:
– MARC 658, “Curriculum objective”
– MODS <subject> @displayLabel
– EAD <subject> @localType
– VRA Core <subject> @type
• Social tagging for timely, audience-appropriate, context-specific indexing
• Semantic reasoning to re-analyze existing metadata

12. FACILITATING ACCESS BASED ON
RESEARCH APPLICATIONS
abstracting, indexing, and encoding techniques
discovery interface design
@AllisonJaiODell Metadata Librarian, University of Florida