Information Scotland The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland ISSN 1743-5471 Issue contents | Journal contents | About the online edition of the journal October 2008 Volume 6(5)

Conferences: Cataloguing & indexing

Semantic web to social tagging

The annual conference of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group took place 3-5 September at Strathclyde University. The SLIC information team went along to find out about the latest developments.

The annual conference of the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group took place 3-5 September at Strathclyde University. The SLIC information team went along to find out about the latest developments.

The conference kicked off with the semantic web, with a Keynote speech from Gordon Dunsire, Depute Director of the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University. Gordon’s keynote concentrated on the role of the librarian in relation to the semantic web, or web3.0. Gordon was awarded the Alan Jeffreys Award 2007 for his internationally-renowned contributions in the field of metadata, at the end of his presentation.

Thursday began with an overview of the Multilingual Access to Subjects (MACS) project. The session was led by Patrice Landry of the Swiss National Library, who explored the issues of multilingualism and subject heading languages.

The mid-morning session featured two diverse strands of classification, with presentations covering the cataloguing of concert programmes and machine readable vocabularies. Deborah Lee, Senior Cataloguer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, outlined her paper exploring the application of faceted classification principles to concert programmes. This provided an interesting insight into the issues associated with classifying such ephemera, offering comparisons and contrasts to the process with more traditional materials.

The second session was delivered by Dr. Aida Slavic, Associate Editor of the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) consortium. Dr. Slavic focused on classification in digital repositories and standards for representing vocabularies in machine readable format. This session included an excellent overview of developments and useful advocacy points.

Social tagging was explored by Charlotte Smith of Newnham College Library, Cambridge, and the day was concluded by Terry Willan of Talis who provided an outline of developments in library management systems.

On Friday Paula Williams of the National Library of Scotland’s Map Library talked about the problems faced when cataloguing place names, pointing out some of the strengths and weaknesses of existing subject schemes. She then went on to look at the developing area of Geographical Information Retrieval (GIR), which is made possible by assigning geo-referencing co-ordinates to places.

The last session of the conference included a talk by Anne Welsh of NHS Education for Scotland on how the various metadata standards and subject headings are used to provide an effective, user-centred service to the Falls Community

Emma McCulloch of the Centre for Digital Library Research then gave a demonstration of HILT IV, explaining how its mapping approach will help solve subject interoperability issues and giving practical examples of its use in the INTUTE and BUBL services. Lastly, Ken Chad, Independent Consultant, spoke about the Research Information Network-funded project on how to improve the creation and flow patterns of bibliographic data.

This interesting and varied programme of events was concluded by visits to the Glasgow School of Art Mackintosh Library and the BBC Scotland Digital Library. 

Information Scotland Vol. 6(5) October 2008

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