Must we abandon LCSH?
Previously, I asked why folksonomies and their kin always seem to be considered as alternatives to controlled vocabularies rather than as complements. Yes, tagging and full-text searching can help users find content they might not otherwise find, and LCSH are problematic—but I don’t think I’d want to be a searcher in a world with no authority control or controlled vocabularies. The revolution might indeed be folksonomied as Karen Schneider writes on ALA TechSource, but I sincerely hope that folksonomies don’t simply replace everything that we had before. Folksonomies can be problematic, too.
Example 1: We need subject headings
Say I’m searching a database for papers about single parent families. An author might use single parent families—or single mother families, single father families, or a number of other phrases. Similarly, users might employ a variety of different tags if this database allowed tagging. As a user, though, I don’t want to search on all of these phrases. I just want to type in “single parent families” and pull up relevant papers.
Example 2: Amazon can be difficult to use, too
I keep hearing that our catalogs are “broken” and that they need to be more like Amazon. Well, suppose I’m looking for a particular edition of a book. I have to click on the title, then scroll down to the second screen, just to find the publisher and year. I’d rather search WorldCat, where I at least get the year on the search results page.
Since the Cookery subject heading seems to be getting a lot of attention, I did a little experiment. “Thai cooking” and “Thai cookery” bring up very similar results as keywords in WorldCat. “Thai cooking” works well in Amazon, but the first result for “Thai cookery” is Mable Hoffman’s Crockery Cookery. Not exactly the first place I’d look for authentic Thai recipes.
While we can learn from Amazon (boy, seeing the book covers is really nice!), don’t forget that they are in a different business. Librarians are in the business of helping people find books. Amazon is in the business of helping people buy books.
Why not use the whole toolbox?
We have a lot of tools available to aid searching—folksonomies, full-text searching, expert lists, and subject headings, to name a few. Why not use all of them?
The release announcing the new NCSU Libraries catalog promises:
students, faculty, and researchers can now search and browse the NCSU Libraries’ collection as quickly and easily as searching and browsing the Web, while taking advantage of rich content and cutting-edge capabilities that no Web search engine can match.
Following up on my previous experiment, I searched the NCSU catalog for “Thai cooking”. When I clicked on the most relevant-looking of the search results, the catalog suggested I might find more relevant books by browsing “Cookery Thai”. It really seems like we can have it both ways.
