New Maps of the Library: Building Better Subject Discovery Tools Using Library of Congress Subject Headings
John Mark Ockerbloom · 2006
We describe tools in development at the University of Pennsylvania to generate and display interactive subject for exploring library collections. Based on the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), these maps are automatically built from existing authority records, a collection's bibliographic records, and optional local tweaks for local interests and search patterns. Users can explore these maps via ordinary textbased web browsing, and browse clusters of related research resources. We now provide these maps for small collections like The Online Books Page, and are experimenting with maps for the entire Penn Library catalog. We hope to enable users to take full advantage of the rich conceptual relationships in LCSH-based library collections, and effectively browse increasingly diverse and dispersed library collections.