1. Funded by | Scottish Institute for Excellence in Social Work Education Taxonomy Focus Group Slides sarah currier | project librarian dept. of social work, university of strathclyde sarah.currier@strath.ac.uk

2. Stòr Cùram Taxonomy Focus Group Overview  Intro to the concept of a taxonomy and to our proposed user centred design methodology.  We will look at some existing vocabularies (and how they may be presented online).  The purpose is open ended discussion arising, sharing of issues and ideas that arise for you.  We will finish by looking at ways forward, identifying folk willing to take part in design.

3. Stòr Cùram Taxonomy eh? what’s that then?  In a library, one way you might want to look for materials is by subject or curriculum area.  You might like to type subject keywords into a search box, like Google, or you might like to browse through a hierarchy of terms.  Browse hierarchies are created with taxonomies, which are essentially classification schemes, like the Dewey Decimal Classification.

4. Stòr Cùram Taxonomy what are the key issues? The vocabulary  Appropriateness of terms, e.g. disabled vs. handicapped etc.  Deciding on the term best used in the taxonomy, but providing access by other terms. The conceptual structure  How do the concepts fit together, i.e. how to express the “natural” relationships- what is contained within what? For instance, is “social work” a subset of “social care” (or vice versa), or are they roughly on a par, or are they the same thing?

5. Existing Subject Vocabularies Some social work / social care vocabularies. 1.Classification based on SiSWE FrameworkSiSWE Framework 2.learndirect Classification System PR,PS,PTlearndirect Classification System 3.JACS classification scheme for social workJACS 4.DDC 360s: Social problems & servicesDDC 5.CareData Keywords, which is being turned into a thesaurus and taxonomy for SCIE eLSC 6.And is based on the DH (Dept. of Health) Thesaurus 7.HMIC Thesaurus (soon to be integrated into DH Thesaurus)HMIC Thesaurus 8.CareKnowledge KeywordsCareKnowledge 9.Others? Let me know …

6. Stòr Cùram Taxonomy user-centred design Card sort / cluster analysis methodology  Gather terms from existing sources (ca. 100).  Subjects are given a pile of cards with terms on them.  They sort the cards into ‘clusters’ that make sense to them.  They name the clusters.  ‘Think-aloud’ while sorting to gather more qualitative data.  Card sort data entered into software which shows clusters for whole group of participants.  Analysis of cluster names and ‘think-aloud’ data.  Draft Taxonomy drawn up from all data and evaluated again by participants / wider group of social work educationalists.  V1.0 Taxonomy will be used to classify existing LOs and browse repository – ongoing iterative developments.

7. Some examples of how taxonomies look in existing repositories 1.The Scottish electronic Staff Development Library (SeSDL): the next 5 slides step you through some screen shots of browsing the SeSDL repository via the SeSDL Taxonomy.Scottish electronic Staff Development Library (SeSDL) 2.The following slide shows the MERLOT repository browse interface, including a “stars” peer review system like Amazon.MERLOT 3.The last slide shows how taxonomies for browsing will look in Stòr Cùram.

15. Finding out more? neil.ballantyne@strath.ac.uk sarah.currier@strath.ac.uk 0141 548 4573 Or visit the project blog: http://storcuram.blogs.com/weblog/ Or website: http://www.storcuram.ac.uk/