Authority Subject Classification

Project:

To develop a hierarchical thesaurus of authority subject terms.

Goals:

• Organize the existing subject terms in the 2002 Weldon Thesaurus, placing them into categories grouped by topic and sub-topic.
• Enter the hierarchy into a new table (the AAR table, as explained below) in the IsisCB Explore system.
• Index and display the AAR data during user searches to show broader, narrower, and related subject terms.
• Provide hierarchical pages for topic areas that will enable users and curators to better visualize and characterize the sciences within their varied historical contexts.

The Team

• Kraig Bartel organized over 2700 subject authorities in the IsisCB as of July 2020.
• Julia Damerow set up an Authority-to-Authority Relationship (AAR) Table in the IsisCB Explore system that will allow encoding of hierarchical and horizontal relationships among authorities.
• Stephen Weldon prepared the first authority relationship set.