Index to Library Trends Volume 38

published or submitted for publicatio

Creating new connections: Objects, people, and digital data at the Musée du quai Branly

This article presents the new cultural heritage regime of the Musée du quai Branly’s collection through an analysis of the digitization of records for objects and documentary data. Non-European collections, notably those at the Musée de l’Homme, have been reconfigured within the new institution. The ‘ethnographic’ artifact, which was once a scientific object, has become a ‘work of art and civilization’ a heritage object registered at the Service des Musées de France. Documentary data, which used to be recorded on paper, was entered into a new classification system: the TMS objects database, here conceived as a social space and a space of knowledge shared by different actors. A study of the informational infrastructure shows how connections are created between humans, objects, and digital data. Analysis of this reconfiguration leads to an examination of the materiality of the digital environment. Classifications depend on material storage systems. Manipulating digital data allows for new working methods in creating an inventory, in particular new associations among data offering new possibilities for bringing together isolated objects and collections in unique ways.L’articolo presenta il nuovo regime patrimoniale delle collezioni del Musée du quai Branly attraverso l’analisi della digitalizzazione delle schede di documentazione e dell’informatizzazione dei processi di gestione degli oggetti. Le collezioni extra-europee, in particolare del Musée de l’Homme, sono state riconfigurate nella nuova istituzione. L’artefatto ‘etnografico’ da oggetto scientifico è diventato ‘un’opera d’arte e di civilizzazione’, un oggetto patrimoniale registrato al Service des Musées de France. I dati documentari cartacei sono stati rielaborati in un nuovo sistema di classificazione: il database TMS oggetti, concepito qui come uno spazio sociale e di conoscenza condiviso da diversi attori museali. Lo studio dell’infrastruttura informazionale mostra le nuove connessioni create tra umani, oggetti e dati digitali. L’analisi della riconfigurazione delle classificazioni mette in scena la materialità dell’ambiente digitale. La manipolazione dei dati digitali permette nuovi metodi di produzione dell’inventario, in particolare la nuova aggregazione dei dati induce a delle associazioni inedite tra oggetti e collezioni

List, group or menu: Organizing Suggestions in Autocompletion Interfaces

We describe two user studies that investigate organization strategies of autocompletion in a known-item search task: searching for terms taken from a thesaurus. In Study 1, we explored ways of grouping term suggestions from two different thesauri (TGN and WordNet) and found that different thesauri may require different organization strategies. Users found Group organization more appropriate to organize location names from TGN, while Alphabetical works better for WordNet. In Study 2, we compared three different organization strategies (Alphabetical, Group and Composite) for location name search tasks. The results indicate that for TGN autocompletion interfaces help improve the quality of keywords, Group and Composite organization help users search faster, and is perceived easier to understand and to use than Alphabetical

Australian subject gateways, the successes and the challenges

The paper provides an overview of subject gateway development in Australia and takes a closer look at three subject gateways coordinated by the University of Queensland: AustLit: Australian Literature Gateway; AVEL Sustainability Knowledge Network, an engineering and sustainable development gateway; and WebLaw, a gateway for legal professionals. The challenges facing subject gateways are examined, including interoperability, coordination and most significantly, sustainability. The paper concludes with the overarching questions being considered by gateway coordinators such as the place of subject gateways and their future given trends in the evolution of the web.<br /

Special Libraries, March 1970

Volume 61, Issue 3https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1970/1002/thumbnail.jp

The Subject Representation of Core Works in Women\u27s Studies: A Critical Analysis of the Library of Congress Subject Headings

The system of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) has been the subject of feminist, critical examinations since the 1970s. Subject headings pertaining both to feminist literature and to women in general have been analyzed to determine how LCSH represents these topics. In this study, I contribute to this body of scholarship by analyzing and reporting on the nature of the LCSH subject representation of 52 core works published from 1986-1998 in the areas of feminist theory and women’s movements. These monographs were selected from the 3rd edition of Women’s Studies: A Recommended Bibliography (Krikos & Ingold, 2004). The analysis of works of/on feminist theory and on women’s movements is preceded by a pilot study of 24 core works on the topics of Communications, Film, Television, Media, and Journalism. I utilize the abstracts of these works in Krikos & Ingold (2004), as well as the works themselves, to establish the nature of each monograph’s perspective and scope. To this information I compare the LC subject headings employed in the bibliographic records representing these works in the Library of Congress Online Catalog in order to assess the headings’ usefulness as surrogate representations of these monographs in terms of accuracy, relevance, specificity, and currency. I present my findings as sets of problems and solutions illustrated with specific examples. Overall, LCSH is not able to represent adequately the 24 works in the pilot study sample or the 52 core works in the main study based on its current application. I conclude with a proposed set of subject headings as suggested by the abstracts of these works

Mapping the Social Life of the Law: An Alternative Approach to Legal Research

As the law moves inexorably to a digital publication model in which books no longer play a role, the problem of how to continue to make the law available to all becomes more acute. Open access initiatives already exist, and more are on the way, but all are limited by their inability to provide more than self-indexed search options for their users. Self-indexing, although a powerful alternative to the traditional pre-indexed searching made possible by systems like West’s “Key Number” digests, has inherent limitations which make it a poor choice as the sole means of researching the law. But developing a new pre-indexed legal digest would be a prohibitively expensive and complex undertaking, making it unlikely that open access legal information sites can develop and maintain a fully-implemented digesting approach to legal research. This article proposes a reconceptualization of the information already contained within most American judicial opinions in order to permit open access sites to offer a form of pre-indexed research to their users. By mapping a case’s location in a graphical representation of the doctrinal development of an issue under consideration, this approach allows the court’s citations to prior authority to act as a pre-indexing tool, allows the researcher to update the law by showing more recent cases that have cited to the target case, and gives the researcher the opportunity to trace network links in order to uncover connections between cases that might otherwise have been difficult to discern