Library of congress subject heading (LCSH) browsing and natural language searching

Abstract

Controlled topical vocabularies (CVs) are built into information systems to aid browsing and retrieval of items that may be unfamiliar, but it is unclear how this feature should be integrated with standard keyword searching. Few systems or scholarly prototypes have attempted this, and none have used the most widely used CV, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which organizes monograph collections in academic libraries throughout the world. This paper describes a working prototype of a Web application that concurrently allows topic exploration using an outline tree view of the LCSH hierarchy and natural language keyword searching of a real-world Science and Engineering bibliographic collection. Pilot testing shows the system is functional, and work to fit the complex LCSH structure into a usable hierarchy is ongoing. This study contributes to knowledge of the practical design decisions required when developing linked interactions between topical hierarchy browsing and natural language searching, which promise to facilitate information discovery and exploration.

The ubiquitous digital file: A review of file management research

“…Although it has been identified as mainly supporting navigation rather than replacing it, search will likely continue to be an important research area. There are many potential improvements to be made to search, for example by improving the display and interactivity of file search results (Smith et al, ), further integrating search with navigation by using queries to guide navigation (Fitchett et al, ), or further still, creating two‐way interactions between the file tree and search results, as has been done with Library of Congress subject heading (LCSH; Julien et al, ). The evaluation of desktop search, where recall and precision are imperfect measures, for reasons discussed above, may find benefit in the application of alternative measures, like mean reciprocal rank.…”

“…Despite relatively clear indications that users prefer and perform navigation in FM contexts, desktop search has a discrete purpose and tagging shows promise, and therefore search and tagging systems will likely continue to develop in the coming years. Improved FM tools may, for example, usefully integrate search and navigation functions (Fitchett, Cockburn, & Gutwin, 2014;Julien, Asadi, Dinneen, & Shu, 2016), or improve searching capabilities by utilising the extensive metadata that users are more likely to remember (Gonçalves & Jorge, 2008a), such as file provenance (Jensen et al, 2010), file type (Blanc-Brude & Scapin, 2007), and time (Dumais et al, 2016).…”

Determining subject headings of documents using information retrieval models

“…Subject heading is a controlled topical vocabulary that is assigned to bibliographic records to find and organize library materials based on topics [5]- [7]. It is important especially when searchers have limited information about the title or authors of documents, so that they can still find documents by their topics.…”