HILCC: A Hierarchical Interface to Library of Congress Classification : a project report on the development of an operational prototype LCC-based subject interface.

Abstract

Those who follow the progress of library-based information access and retrieval technologies will, if pressed, be obliged to admit that libraries and the automated system vendors that serve them have done little in the last decade to improve subject access to our print and, now, online collections. Much has of course been written and proposed in the library and information science literature about possible new strategies for access and retrieval, but few new approaches have actually been developed, tested and implemented in recent generations of library OPACs. Some would attribute this variously to: the marginal economics of library automation's niche marketplace; the timid approach vendors have taken to their feature enhancement processes; the enormous technical infrastructure changes libraries and vendors have had to absorb over the last ten years in order to stay even minimally current with new technologies; the aging systems of classification and subject analysis that continue to serve as our cataloging standards; the difficulty of innovating in OPACs when developers are constrained by the heavy hand of Z39.50 and fear the loss of interoperability with consortia and other cooperative systems; and the rise of the Web and the seemingly universal appeal of know-nothing, shot-in-the-dark keyword-Booleanism.