WGBH Open Vault

Working with MERLOT to Build a Multi-Discipline Browsing Hierarchy

- Karen Colbron and Helen Brady -

Project overview

3 different sites developed from 3 different grants: New Television Workshop

Experimental video art Say Brother

Local series on African American Community in Boston Ten O’clock News

Nightly local news series - select stories on African American community in Boston and busing

Issues with the 3 previous sites

No cross reference

No cross searching

Each site evolved with more sophistication

Overall goal

Bring 3 sites together with cross searchable metadata and general subject heading browsing

Add approximately 50 new assets from the WGBH archive

What are the new assets?

44 interviews from War and Peace in the Nuclear Age

1 interview from Vietnam: A Television History

1 interview from Press and the People

5 public domain assets to contextualize the interview material

Open Vault

http://openvault.wgbh.org

Project Goals

Catalogue Items

Create a browsing hierarchy

Provide subject-based access to resources

Collections

New Television Workshop

Say Brother

Ten O’Clock News

War and Peace in the Nuclear Age

Choosing MERLOT

Strengths: Higher Ed. Focus Science Pedagogy Business History

Less Developed Areas History of Education Educational Structure/

Institutions Social Science Arts

Hierarchy Parameters

At Least 3 levels of detail for each item

The top 2 levels from MERLOT

The final level would be a Library of Congress term

Supplementary Vocabularies used

Library of Congress

UNESCO

INTUTE

Tools Used

MERLOT Subject Categories http://www.merlot.org/merlot/categories.htm

Classification Web http://classificationweb.net/

UNESCO Thesaurus http://www2.ulcc.ac.uk/unesco/thesaurus.htm

INTUTE Social Science Thesaurus http://www.intute.ac.uk/

Library of Congress Authority Headings http://authorities.loc.gov/

Filemaker Pro Database

Browsing Hierarchyversus Searching

Ability to find items using complex, compound categories (e.g. African Americans - Relations with law enforcement)

Precision

Outcomes

1366 of items catalogued

Browsing hierarchy created

Precision finding tool

Collocation of resources