Classification and Indexing Section
Working Group on
Subject Access to Web resources
Subject Access Approaches used by Digital Collections and Information Directories
Report on current progress
The Working Group on Subject Access was proposed at the IFLA Thailand Conference in 1999 and met in 2001. It consists of 11 members from the Classification and Indexing Section and Bibliography Section.
The purpose of the WG is to monitor trends in the provision of subject access to electronic documents on the Web, and to establish a database about subject access approaches used by digital collections and web-based information directories and portals.
During the past year, members of the WG contributed to the database through a web-based form that was set up by Marcia Zeng for this project. They have covered various countries such as: Czechia (by Marie Balikova and Bohdana Stoklasova), France and Canada-French site (by Max Naudi), The Nethelands (by Johan Stapel), Sweden, Denmark, and Norway (by Pia Leth), USA and International (by Lois Mai Chan) China, USA, Australia, Finland, Germany, Malaysia, and UK (by Marcia Lei Zeng).
As of July 2002, the WG had collected data from 14 countries, 7 languages, with a total of 50 resources. The prelimilary collection of the data covers the following countries, but the number of the resources visited does not indicate the number of resources available in that country. Primary languages of the sources include English (34), Swedish (5), Czech (3), Chinese (3), French (3), Danish (1), and Norwegian(1)
Known classification schemes used by the resources investigated include Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), SAB Classification (Klassifikationssytem for Svenska bibliotek) (Sweden), MOS Class (Denmark), ACM Computing Classification System, Chinese Library Classification, Nederlandse Basisclassificatie, Open Directory Project Categories, Yahoo categories, and LookSmart Directory categories.
Subject vocabularies used include MeSH, F-MeSH, SAO (Svenska ämnesord), Thesauri from Swedish EnviroNet, Czech National Subject Authority, GEM Controlled Subject Vocabulary, AVEL Thesaurus, Geo-Guide Subject Catalog, and Science Standard Hierarchies.
We also looked at the overall structures of the subject access provided by these visited resources. Excluding those popular schemes, among the 40 folk categories or hierarchies, 16 have a hierarchical structure with 3 levels or more levels; 24 have organized their sources with several very broad groups (1-2 levels only).
More than 2/3 of the resource sites have search functions. Less than ½ have site maps or site indexes. No one has a visualized site map. Most of the sites provide both search and browse options.
The next step of the WG is to try to cover more countries and more languages.
We sincerely hope to have the help from IFLA members who would volunteer to contribute one to three items of his/her respective language or country. Please Email to Marcia Zeng (mzeng@kent.edu) for the description of how you could join this project.
The web-based form is at http://circe.slis.kent.edu/mzeng/webdl.htm, if you would like to take a look at it before you make your decision.
We would like to double the size of the current database and triple the number of countries and languages to be covered by the database by next IFLA conference in 2003.
Marcia Lei Zeng
Chair of the WG
