The Faceted Subject Access Interest Group met from 4:00 to 5:00 on Saturday, June 23, during the American Library Association’s 2018 Annual Conference with 45 people in attendance. The program consisted of one presentation on replacing vendor supplied 650 #4’s with Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) & Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) headings and an OCLC FAST Project update. The OCLC report and the presentation slides may be accessed from the interest group’s ALA Connect site: http://connect.ala.org/node/273985 Jody DeRidder, Director, Metadata Framework, Global Product Management, from OCLC gave an update on FAST and asked audience input on various ideas that are being considered. After completing and analyzing the survey in-depth interviews were held with 10 institutions to delve deeper into FAST and gain a better understanding of what libraries need. The primary needs and concerns found through this process included: long-term support for FAST, ease of use, adding new features such as batch conversion, clearly defining the relationship with LCSH, adding guidance, and improving the content and coverage. One of the key questions currently being worked on by OCLC is the addition of new terms (language or culture specific, increased coverage, etc.) and where and how to create them. OCLC is also investigating an Editorial Policy Committee for FAST, the committee would be made up of community members and would oversee community engagement, establish policies and principles, recommend strategic directions, etc.
Kelsey George, Cataloging & Metadata Services Librarian, from the University of Nevada – Las Vegas presented virtually on her project to improve subject access to over 3,000 retrospective electronic theses and dissertation (ETD) records. The ETD records from ProQuest came with minimal subject headings in the 655 #4, UNLV determined that they wanted to replace them with LCSH (and FAST) terms. The ProQuest headings were extracted from the MARC records and pulled into OpenRefine to create a list of unique values. The first attempt to match LCSH headings to the ProQuest values was attempted using the batch subject search in the OCLC Connexion Client. When this failed, due to an inability to restrict which fields in the authority record a term matches against, each heading was searched manually to find a best match. Once matches were found and records updated using MarcEdit, LCSH strings were put through the FAST Converter and FAST headings added to the records. Kelsey would like to eventually build a tool that uses Pymarc or Python to find a way to browse the LC authority file and match only to 15X and 55X fields. A recording of her presentation may be found at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/batch-authority-searching-python-kelsey-george/