So I'm deleting all the Bisac subject headings (650_7|2bisacsh) from our ebook
records - they were deemed not to be useful, especially as it would entail a
for-fee indexing change to make them clickable. But I'm thinking if we someday
have a discovery system, they'll be useful as a means for broader-to-narrower
term browsing that won't require translation to English, as would call number
ranges.
As I watch the system slowly chunk through them, I think about how library
collections and catalogs facilitate jumping to the most specific subjects, but
browsing is something of an afterthought.
What if we could set a ranking score for the "importance" of an item in
browsing, based on circulation data - authors ranked by the relative
circulation of all their works, same for series, latest edition of a
multi-edition work given higher ranking, etc.? Then have a means to set the
threshold importance value you want to look at, and browse through these
general Bisac terms, or the classification? Or have a facet for "importance"
threshold. I see Bisac sometimes has a broadness/narrowness facet ("overview")
- wonder how consistently that's applied, enough to be useful?
Guess those rankings would be very expensive in compute time.
Well, back to the deletions.
Cindy Harper
Electronic Services and Serials Librarian
Virginia Theological Seminary
3737 Seminary Road
Alexandria VA 22304
703-461-1794
[email protected]
