[Koha] Something to chew on - Subject Conspectus

[BWS Johnson]

Salvete!

As far as I can tell, this isn't being considered now for future
inclusion. While there are improvements slated for reports, I don't
think there's an overhaul planned that would bring things up to the
level of fine detail that would be useful for the purpose of serving as,
or going a long way towards a conspectus. RDA seems to have ducked the
issue, but with the rules just now kind of sort of out 

http://www.rdaonline.org/constituencyreview/

it seems like they've temporarily ducked the subject stickiness. (I
skimmed, it's early yet!)

My mind goes back to the nifty feature in the Extensible Catalogue that
essentially brute forced authority files. It would be neat to have a
similar feature to operate on subjects where possible. The subroutine
could check a given record, see if it were missing a Dewey, an LC, or a
SuDoc number, then attempt to pull the missing field from the world at
large. This could then go into a queue where a cataloguer could check
what the computer was doing and confirm or deny changes. It's obviously
more complex than the authority check that the XC lads are on to, but
man would it be worthwhile. Having this coupled with a granular subject
based circulation report would allow for ridiculously high quality
collection development. Following my closing is a letter that went
across the GOVDOC listserv from someone else about one of the current
problems in only having things indexed under one subject heading, which
was what got me rethinking this.

Cheers,
Brooke


I'm going to reply to the list because I am also interested in this
question.

Our library has tried unsuccessfully to do this kind of analysis. Most
of
our current collection analysis depends on Dewey or LC call numbers. We
map
the Dewey and LC numbers to specific subject categories and then run a
count
of the number of items held by each library in our consortium based on
that
call number range. You can see the results at
http://www.alc.org/acdc/INDEX.HTML

The problem is we could never map Sudoc with fine enough accuracy to the
Dewey or LC classification system, so Sudoc numbers are NOT included in
our
analysis, to my intense regret. There was some discussion a while back
on
govdoc-l about a crosswalk between Sudoc and Dewey/LC, but I don't
recall
that anyone had a ready made solution.

Many of the oclc records for documents have LC numbers associated with
them. It may be possible to include some govdocs by using the associated
LC
number contained in the bib. record. This would pick up some documents
but
not all. I asked Marcive once about how many GPO records came with an LC
class number. They said it was a very small percentage. While attempting
to use the predetermined LC class might be be better than nothing, but
it
still seems like a less than desirable solution.

I would be interested in what others are doing.

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