Presenter
Michele Stefani (@mist)
Abstract
Cataloguers all over the world invest substantial effort in subject indexing and classification, yet two barriers remain:
- subject headings and classification structures are often difficult for end users to interpret and navigate.
- in a multilingual context records indexed using a vocabulary in one language may be difficult to retrieve through searches in another.
This problem is especially relevant in Switzerland, where Italian-, German- and French-speaking institutions use different authority files (Nuovo Soggettario, GND, IdRef).
At the Library of the Academy of Architecture in Mendrisio, I developed Subject Navigator, a Chrome extension that reads MARC21 records and adds a discreet sidebar to the Primo VE interface: it displays subject terms, thesaurus hierarchies, multilingual equivalents, authority identifiers and local classification structures, while supporting multilingual subject and classification searches.
The extension relies on a local reconciliation index linking NS concepts to GND, IdRef, LCSH and BNE through SKOS correspondences and inter-authority mappings; Wikidata acts as a secondary source of identifiers and entity enrichment.
A browser extension was chosen because it can augment the proprietary catalogue interface without modifying shared MARC records or the underlying system.
The presentation will demonstrate the installation and operation of the extension, discuss its current limitations and future distribution, and explain how AI-assisted coding was combined with tests and validations against real records, although formal usability testing has not yet been conducted.
It will also consider how the approach and its reconciliation data could be reused in other MARC21-based catalogues.
Source code and installation instructions are available at: GitHub - MicheleStefani/subjectnavigator: A browser extension for multilingual subject navigation across three controlled vocabularies (GND, IdRef, SBT) in the SLSP Swiss library network. Built for Architecture's Academy Library catalogue (USI - Università della Svizzera Italiana). · GitHub