here is a lot of competition in the area of general subject trees, but the largest services don't display
very convincing structures or resource descriptions. BUBL made a good choice by selecting an
established library classification system (UDC) in preference to a home-made system.
However, many of the subject areas are not very comprehensively covered. No indication is given as to whether it is a quality-assessed selection, or just a small collection. There are a couple of huge subject-structured collections offered on the Internet, and the user should know the selection criteria and strength of every collection in order to be able to choose which to rely upon. BUBL's Subject Tree is maintained by LIS professionals, whereas that of Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com/) and the WWW Virtual Library (http://www.w3.org/hypertext/DataSources/bySubject/Overview2.html) are maintained largely by authors and Internet users. The difference in comprehensiveness, clear selection, construction and description principles should be made obvious to the user.
BUBL gives the choice between UDC or alphabetical arrangement. The UDC hierarchy is not very well displayed (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Tree.html), with selected subsections only shown in a linear list. Subject substructures or facets (e.g. by type) would have been possible on most pages. The solution in the Computing section (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Computing.html) is commendable up to a point, with the lack of a decent UDC substructure compensated for by a homemade subject structure (although unfortunately this is in an alphabetical arrangement with 'General Computing' in the middle of a long page).
On every page, the links are listed simply in alphabetical order (not always correctly - have a look at Arts at http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/Art.html!). The resources from BUBL's Gopher menu are only presented as one link above the individual WWW resource links in every subject page. The titles and annotations for the resources are often too brief, and an indication of the original language of resources (such as, for example, 'Art Library Oslo: all information in Norwegian') is missing.
I believe that it would be worth investigating whether cooperation with the NISS (http://www.niss.ac.uk/subject/index.html) and other UK Subject Tree projects would accomplish better coverage, quality control, resource description and subject structure. An alternative would be a looser coordination of different subject collections, managed in a decentralised way, applying different selection and quality criteria, different levels of resource description and varying structures. Some UK institutions (SOSIG, UKOLN and the University of Loughborough) are part of the EU project DESIRE (http://www.ub2.lu.se/desire/), which has as one of its goals the development of an architecture which allows for a comprehensive usage of the material from subject-based information gateways (distributed resource discovery based on rich descriptions and quality-controlled resource catalogues for specific subject areas).
Incidentally, is the connection with the material from the CATRIONA project (http://www.bubl.bath.ac.uk/BUBL/maincatriona.html) in the home page an indication of coming efforts towards 'real Internet cataloguing'? There is not much bibliographic control of this material at the moment. The other current initiatives in this area (OCLC MARC cataloguing, Metadata discussions, Dublin Core Set etc.) are encountering significant problems.
Traugott Koch
Electronic Information Services Librarian
Lund University Library
Development Department
NetLab
P.O. Box 3
S-221 00
LUND
Sweden
Tel: int+46 46 2229233
Fax: int+46 46 2223682 or 2224422
E-mail: traugott.koch@ub2.lu.se
26.11.95
Traugott Koch is also featured in the "Wire" section of this issue.
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