Organizing subject access to cultural heritage in Swedish online museums

PurposeThe study aims to paint a representative picture of the current state of search interfaces of Swedish online museum collections, focussing on search functionalities with particular reference to subject searching, as well as the use of controlled vocabularies, with the purpose of identifying which improvements of the search interfaces are needed to ensure high-quality information retrieval for the end user.Design/methodology/approachIn the first step, a set of 21 search interface criteria was identified, based on related research and current standards in the domain of cultural heritage knowledge organization. Secondly, a complete set of Swedish museums that provide online access to their collections was identified, comprising nine cross-search services and 91 individual museums' websites. These 100 websites were each evaluated against the 21 criteria, between 1 July and 31 August 2020.FindingsAlthough many standards and guidelines are in place to ensure quality-controlled subject indexing, which in turn support information retrieval of relevant resources (as individual or full search results), the study shows that they are not broadly implemented, resulting in information retrieval failures for the end user. The study also demonstrates a strong need for the implementation of controlled vocabularies in these museums.Originality/valueThis study is a rare piece of research which examines subject searching in online museums; the 21 search criteria and their use in the analysis of the complete set of online collections of a country represents a considerable and unique contribution to the fields of knowledge organization and information retrieval of cultural heritage. Its particular value lies in showing how the needs of end users, many of which are documented and reflected in international standards and guidelines, should be taken into account in designing search tools for these museums; especially so in subject searching, which is the most complex and yet the most common type of search. Much effort has been invested into digitizing cultural heritage collections, but access to them is hindered by poor search functionality. This study identifies which are the most important aspects to improve.

How Agricultural Digital Innovation Can Benefit from Semantics: The Case of the AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus

AGROVOC is the multilingual thesaurus managed and published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Its content is available in more than 40 languages and covers all the FAO’s areas of interest. The structural basis is a resource description framework (RDF) and simple knowledge organization system (SKOS). More than 39,000 concepts identified by a uniform resource identifier (URI) and 800,000 terms are related through a hierarchical system and aligned to knowledge organization systems. This paper aims to illustrate the recent developments in the context of AGROVOC and to present use cases where it has contributed to enhancing the interoperability of data shared by different information systems.

Teaching an Algorithm How to Catalog a Book

This paper presents a study of a strategy for automated cataloging within an OPAC or for online bibliographic catalogs generally. The aim of the analysis is to offer a set of results, while searching in library catalogs, that goes further than the expected one-to-one term correspondence. The goal is to understand how ontological structures can affect query search results. This analysis can also be applied to search functions other than in the library context, but in this case, cataloging relies on predefined rules and noncontrolled dictionary terms, which means that the results are meaningful in terms of knowledge organization. The approach was tested on an Edisco database, and we measured the system’s ability to detect whether a new incoming record belonged to a specific set of textbooks.

Representación de tesauros en SKOS

Los tesauros se han adaptado progresivamente a los entornos digitales demostrando su capacidad de integración con las tecnologías de la Web Semántica. No obstante, la convergencia de tesauros y Web Semántica no es tan directa como aparentemente pudiera parecer. Este trabajo analiza y contrasta los constructos y reglas de integridad de ISO 25964 y SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization System). Se examinan igualmente las representaciones en SKOS de los tesauros AGROVOC, EuroVoc y Unesco con el fin de estudiar las soluciones llevadas a cabo. Por último, se abordan los retos percibidos, considerando particularmente la integración de los tesauros con los datos enlazados y el desarrollo de ontologías.