Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) Browsing and Natural Language Searching

TL;DR

This paper presents a web application prototype that integrates Library of Congress Subject Headings browsing with natural language keyword search, enhancing information discovery in bibliographic collections.

Contribution

It introduces a novel system combining hierarchical LCSH browsing with keyword search, demonstrating practical design for linked interactions in information retrieval.

Findings

System is functional and supports concurrent browsing and searching

Work is ongoing to optimize LCSH hierarchy usability

Facilitates improved exploration of bibliographic collections

Abstract

Controlled topical vocabularies (CVs) are built into information systems to aid browsing and retrieval of items that may be unfamiliar, but it is unclear how this feature should be integrated with standard keyword searching. Few systems or scholarly prototypes have attempted this, and none have used the most widely used CV, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which organizes monograph collections in academic libraries throughout the world. This paper describes a working prototype of a Web application that concurrently allows topic exploration using an outline tree view of the LCSH hierarchy and natural language keyword searching of a real-world Science and Engineering bibliographic collection. Pilot testing shows the system is functional, and work to fit the complex LCSH structure into a usable hierarchy is ongoing. This study contributes to knowledge of the practical design decisions required when developing linked interactions between topical hierarchy browsing and natural language searching, which promise to facilitate information discovery and exploration.