Towards a High-level Thesaurus

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SCONE, HILT, Collection Strength, and Standards 
Dennis Nicholson / Gordon Dunsire
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Overview

• Collection strength Uses in Scotland
• Conspectus, Collaboration, RCO, CAIRNS
  landscaping
• SCONE objectivity, effort, subjects HILT
• HILT Consensus and a TeRM pilot
• SCONE Judgement now, automation later?
• Interoperability and re-use issues
• Collection strength Uses in the DN(E)R? New
  projects Lessons
• Demonstrations

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Collection Strength in Scotland

• Collaborative Collecting
• SCURL, Conspectus, CCD policies
• User guidance
• Research Collections Online
• CAIRNS distributed catalogue and dynamic
  landscaping
• SCONE

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SCONE (Selected aims)

• Expand collections coverage
• Identify less subjective, less labour intensive
  methods of measuring collection strength
• Develop CCM (Collaborative Collection Management)
  support tools e.g. a collections and dynamic
  landscaping management portal SCAMP
• Map Conspectus to other subject schemes led to
  HILT

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HILT

• Investigating problems of cross-searching,
  browsing by subject across UK sectors and domains
  
• Aiming at consensus on way forward
• Favoured outcome an interactive terminologies
  route map not a HILT as such a process for
  change not another thesaurus
• Recognition that consensus is the key

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HILT

• HILT Phase II would involve terminology mapping
  but ask
• Which is best long-term option mapping or
  single scheme?
• Does map need single hierarchical scheme as a
  spine
• Issues
• Spine and mapping a problem for CS
  interoperability? Single scheme implied?
• But there are other issues and consensus
  remains the key services and professionals
  across the domains must be convinced

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SCONE Interim Conclusions

• Conspectus
• Subjective labour-intensive
• SCONE Alternatives
• Brief tests? List checks? Shelf scans? Automated
  methods? External evaluation? Citation analysis?
  User based techniques (Circulation, ILL, DD
  statistics etc.) ? Professional judgment key
  to all?
• Interim conclusion
• Professional judgement constrained by SCAMP CCD/
  user needs environment agreed methods/peer
  review (But)

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An Automated Future?

• Unhelpful, inherently subjective concept?
• Strong for who, for what purpose? (CURL)
• Disaggregate idea to give users/staff clearer
  guidance? Questions include
• Count? Relative to what? Since when? Current
  intensity? Responsibility? Quality? Experience
  level? Audience level? Small but significant?
  Distributed strength? Subjective helpful if
  explicit? Cohesion? Granular characteristics?
• Can the strength elements of dynamic
  aggregations be dynamically generated? Is this
  the future of dynamic landscaping?

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Other Dimensions

• Granularity (as ever) complicates things
• At which level of subject granularity do we
  measure a collection strength (or element)?
• How can we telegraph (describe) a strength
  measured at one level at a higher level?
• Does a strength cascade down to a subject
  sub-division?

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Issues Interoperability Re-use

• Agree on strength elements, how
  measured,described, what valid uses and
  limitations are then assess or count
• Local slant needed on data? Named collections
  and strength
• Assess/Count using which scheme at what
  granularity level? Spine or common scheme?
  Consensus still the key

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Collection strength and the DN(E)R

• Collaborative Collecting
• High-level gap identification
• Deep resource sharing
• User guidance
• Information on strong and special collections,
  including access conditions
• Scoping ahead/ dynamic landscaping
• New projects for (some) answers
• HILT Phase II (CLD a key focus)
• CLD focus in clumps/Copac project

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Lessons from CAIRNS, SCONE

• Users increasingly use/need distributed
  resources, finding tools so co-operation now
  essential as well as desirable
• Distributed networked collections need
  collaborative management
• Coherent distributed virtual libraries wont
  just happen we must co-operate to manage
  retrieval/user environments
• People interoperability a pre-requisite of
  technical and metadata interoperability
• Co-operative Infrastructure, CoSMiC, SCAMP

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Demonstrations

• CAIRNS service and dynamic landscaping
• SCONE named collections database service
• SCAMP landscaping and collections management
  portal

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Thank you!

• http//scone.strath.ac.uk/
• http//scone.strath.ac.uk/service/index.cfm
• http//scone.strath.ac.uk/scamp/index.html
• http//hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/
• d.m.nicholson_at_strath.ac.uk
• g.dunsire_at_napier.ac.uk