Build Your Own Subject Heading

April 21, 2009

Subject headings are an amazing source of information for anyone doing research. Unfortunately mere mortals often have trouble digesting the rich and detailed data found in these heading.

In order to make the subject headings of our digital collections easier to consume we have taken subject headings and chopped them up. We used the sliced and diced subjects and constructed a tag cloud. The tag cloud shows users how popular the subjects are in are collections. The tag cloud makes it easy for a users to pick a topic they are interest in, view the results form our collection based on that topic, and then continue drilling down until they are ready to dive into the data.

For example, if I picked “Mormon” from the first tag cloud, the system would tell me which collections used “Mormon” in the subject heading and provide a second tag cloud of related topics, such as missionary, Book or Mormon, and Utah. Find out more by trying our prototype.

Jacob