MyLibrary

Think of MyLibrary as if it were a three-layered chocolate cake. One layer is librarians — the people who do the work. The second layer is information resources — the traditional content of libraries. The third layer is patrons — the people who use the information resources. The stuff holding the cake together and makes the cake extra exciting is the icing — the facets & terms (think “controlled vocabulary”). This posting elaborates on what these facet & terms are.

Facets & terms are the controlled vocabulary and authority list of your digital library. For better or for worse, facet & terms are of a simple design. It is not an infinitely deep hierarchal list of thesaurus terms. Rather it is an infinite number of sets of two-dimensional, locally defined concepts that are expected to be assigned to librarians, patrons, as well as information resources.

In MyLibrary parlance, facets are very broad concepts. Each facet has only three characteristics: 1) an id, 2) a name, and 3) a definition. Facets (as well as terms) are locally defined in each MyLibrary implementation. You are expected to create your own set of facets and terms. Example facet names and definitions might include:

• formats - the physical manifestation of information
• names - pronouns used to identify people
• places - geographic locations
• audiences - segments of a user population
• subjects - the “aboutness” of items
• flags - sets of true or false (Boolean) values
• research tools - various devices used to find and evaluate information
• language - the syntax and semantics of written and verbal communication

Each facet is expected to be associated with one or more terms, specific types of things exemplifying the facet. Terms only have four characteristics: 1) an id, 2) a name, 3) a definition, and 4) a pointer to its parent facet. Here is a list of possible term names and definitions:

• Books - codexes (a format)
• Journals - a type of serial publication (a format)
• Articles - the primary content of a journal (a format)
• Manuscripts - pre-published materials usually in hand-written form (a format)
• Pictures - is worth a thousand words (a format)

• Mark Twain - an American author (a name)
• Fred Kilgour - the founder of OCLC (a name)
• Project Gutenberg - a collection of electronic texts (a name)
• Huckleberry Finn - a fictional character in a story by Mark Twain (a name)

• United States - a country in the Western hemisphere (a place)
• Freshman Dorm #1 - the student residence next to Dorm #2 (a place)
• North Pole - that very cold place (a place)
• Never Neverland - the fictional location in Peter Pan (a place)

• Freshman - students just staring out (an audience)
• Sophomore - second year students (an audience)
• Young adult - children older than 12 but younger than 18 (an audience)
• Student - a person whose job is to learn (an audience)
• Senior citizen - generally speaking, a person older than 65 (an audience)

• Astronomy - the study of the stars (a subject)
• Physics - the analysis of moving things (a subject)
• Mathematics - does 2 + 2 really equal 4 (a subject)
• Origami - paper folding (a subject)
• Telephony - the practical use of using telephones (a subject)

• Scholarly - written with an academic bent (a flag)
• Peer-reviewed - evaluated by fellow academics (a flag)
• Free - available without a fee (a flag)
• Windows-only - cannot be run on Macintosh or Unix computers (a flag)
• Sponsored by Inspire - purchase through a specific consortial agreement (a flag)

• Index - a list of items with pointers to where the actual items reside (a research tool)
• Catalog - a specific type of index pertaining to libraries (a research tool)
• Dictionary - an alphabetical list of words and their definitions (a research tool)
• Thesaurus - a list words and their synonyms (a research tool)
• Manual - a book providing instructions (a research tool)

• French - the spoken word of people in France (a language)
• Perl - an interpreted computer programming language (a language)
• Pig Latin - sort of like speaking backwards (a language)
• Spanish - an increasingly popular language in the Western hemisphere (a language)

Once a set of facet/term combinations are created any number of them are expected to be assigned to information resources. Consequently, if you had something called DLib Magazine you might end up associating these facet/term combinations:

• subject/computer science
• subject/digital librarianship
• format/journal
• flags/free
• flags/scholarly
• language/English

If you wanted to apply analytics to the Directory of Open Access Journals you might using these:

• research tools/directory
• flags/free
• language/English
• language/French
• language/Spanish

Heck, if I wanted to describe a chair I might use something like this:

• format/furniture
• material/wood
• color/brown

Facet/term combinations are expected to be assigned to librarians and patrons as well as information resources. By doing so you create relationships not only between information resources, but between information resources and people. For example, if you “catalog” librarians with subject terms, then you can find out who is responsible for managing the related information resources. If you “catalog” users with subject terms, then then you discover the name of the librarian for that subject. “Your librarian is…”. If some of your information resources are really services (such document delivery or bibliographic instruction), and you “catalog” these services as audience/faculty and audience/student accordingly, and if you “catalog” users with these combinations, then you can offer specific services to specific patrons.

Once facet/term combinations are applied to information resources, librarians, and patrons, you will be able to create reports against your MyLibrary implementation such as:

• list all astronomy resources
• list all astronomy journals
• list all scholarly, peer-reviewed astronomy journals
• list all things associated with Mark Twain
• list all books associated with Mark Twain
• list all books written in Spanish associated with Mark Twain
• list all books written in Spanish associated with Mark Twain and are free
• list all the librarians
• list all the librarians who specialize in mathematics
• list my librarians
• list all mathematics librarians who deal with journals
• list all of the patrons who work in the area of astronomy
• list all of the patrons who work in the area of astronomy and are freshman
• list all of the patrons who work in astronomy as well as music
• list my patrons

In summary, facet/term combinations are a way to create controlled vocabularies and authority lists in your MyLibrary instance. When creating facet/term combinations, think beyond subject listings. Use these facet/term combinations to create relationships between information resources and librarians and patrons. MyLibrary is more than a “catalog”, it is tool for implementing digital libraries where collections are created and services are provided against them.

Tags: Facets & Terms //