Faceted Taxonomies for the Performing Arts Domain: the Case of the European Collected Library of Artistic Performance

The exponential growth of online cultural content presented performing arts heritage institutions with the necessity to adopt new strategies in order to ensure the certification, fruition and re-usability of both their Non Book Materials and textual documents. The case study of a performing arts digital library is described through an interdisciplinary perspective, in order to demonstrate the advantages deriving from the application of Knowledge Organization to performing arts domain. The article illustrates how controlled vocabularies and faceted taxonomies can improve end-users’ access and foster the clustering and the contextualization of theatrical documents. The paper also outlines how shared vocabularies may support transnational dialogue between various cultural repositories and network different types of items. A model for indexing, organizing and displaying resources within a domain specific digital library is proposed