Subject Access in Swedish Discovery Services

While support for subject searching has been traditionally advocated for in library catalogs, often in the form of a catalog objective to find everything that a library has on a certain topic, research has shown that subject access has not been satisfactory. Many existing online catalogs and discovery services do not seem to make good use of the intellectual effort invested into assigning controlled subject index terms and classes. For example, few support hierarchical browsing of classification schemes and other controlled vocabularies with hierarchical structures, few provide end-user-friendly options to choose a more specific concept to increase precision, a broader concept or related concepts to increase recall, to disambiguate homonyms, or to find which term is best used to name a concept. Optimum subject access in library catalogs and discovery services is analyzed from the perspective of earlier research as well as contemporary conceptual models and cataloguing codes. Eighteen proposed features of what this should entail in practice are drawn. In an exploratory qualitative study, the three most common discovery services used in Swedish academic libraries are analyzed against these features. In line with previous research, subject access in contemporary interfaces is demonstrated to less than optimal. This is in spite of the fact that individual collections have been indexed with controlled vocabularies and a significant number of controlled vocabularies have been mapped to each other and are available in interoperable standards. Strategic action is proposed to build research-informed (inter)national standards and guidelines