More about facets
Posted by Monica Berger on September 27, 2006
I was really excited to see Stephen’s posting about faceted navigation and I surfed over to his wiki page. One of my favorite projects in library school was in my classification and subject analysis course: a presentation on the great Indian librarian, S.R. Ranganathan. I loved the clarity and simplicity of his idea of using five facets to describe and classify EVERYTHING:
Personality–what the object is primarily “about.” This is considered the “main facet.”
Matter–the material of the object
Energy–the processes or activities that take place in relation to the object
Space–where the object happens or exists
Time–when the object occurs (the PMEST is cribbed from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/ranganathan_for_ias)
Anyway, I read a cool article this summer in TECHKNOW, a newsletter from the Ohio Library Council for technical services librarians (highly recommended), about how a team at OCLC has developed this “Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) schema and authority file,
consisting of headings derived from LCSH that are amenable to postcoordination
and authority control. ” http://www.library.kent.edu/files/TechKNOW_July_2006.pdf
More info. on the OCLC website: http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/fast/default.htm
I hope some of our catalogers/metadata experts can look at this and respond.
This entry was posted on September 27, 2006 at 5:02 pm and is filed under Faceted navigation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
