Subject Access to Your Information Sandy Tucker Texas A&M University Libraries August 1, 2006 Second International Symposium on Transportation Technology Transfer

Introduction You have packages – books, pamphlets, files, electronic documents. You have records of packages – cards or an online database. Other? We’re talking about adding subject information to the records of packages. Specifically, we’ll talk about using a “controlled vocabulary.”

Controlled Vocabulary Using a fixed list of subject terms. Why? To pull together all of the information on a topic, no matter what terms the author has used. Example: Driving under the influence Driving while intoxicated Drunk driving

You Have Choices Clearinghouse Subject List LTAP Center Subject Lists Transportation Research Thesaurus Your own list

Use a Short List or a Long List of Terms? If you have a small collection, a short list of terms is appropriate. If you have a large collection, a longer list of more specific terms, such as the Transportation Research Thesaurus, may be helpful. Longer list will help describe your packages in more specific ways.

Subject Access to Other Kinds of Information People – Expertise Groups of People Projects Equipment, Facilities Use the same set of subject headings to describe them.

Transportation Research Thesaurus (TRT) Created under the National Cooperative Highway Research Program. Available electronically to search or download at (TRB). Also at National Transportation Library: Covers all modes and aspects of transportation.

Purposes of the TRT To provide a common set of terms for use by authors, indexers, and searchers. To promote consistency in assignment of index terms. To show relationships between terms – broader, narrower, related. To serve as a searching aid in retrieval of documents.

Structure of TRT Terms are grouped into 21 facets or hierarchies. Each facet has a top term, for example, Testing. Each facet contains terms that are closely related and subordinate to the top term.

Available Views of Terms Hierarchical – to see broader and narrower terms and to see how a term fits into the larger scheme. Alphabetical – useful if you know the first word of the term. Keyword – to find phrases that contain your term. From each view you can jump to others.

Postable/Nonpostable Terms TRT contains both postable terms, which are intended for use, and nonpostable terms, also called lead-in vocabulary. Nonpostable terms direct the user to the preferred, postable term.

Indexing Use as many terms from as many hierarchies as needed to describe the item fully. The number of terms needed will vary according to the nature of the document but will typically range from six to ten. The book in the example I’m going to show needs just three terms.

Example - Indexing Title: The Impact of Highways on Wetlands Terms: Highways (from Facilities facet) Environmental Impacts (from Environment facet) Wetlands (from Areas & Regions facet)

Searching Use the TRT terms you have assigned to search your own collection. Use TRT terms to search TRIS Online for additional information.

Summary Add subject terms to your records to pull together all of your information on a topic. Think about adding subject terms to records of people or equipment in addition to records of documents. Use a list of terms that is scaled to your collection.

Summary, cont. Consider using the Transportation Research Thesaurus for your subject headings if your collection is large you need specificity in your terminology. Use the Transportation Research Thesaurus to select terms for searching TRIS Online.

Questions, Discussion?