A Tool for Systematic Visualization of Controlled Descriptors and Their Relation to Others as a Rich Context for a Discovery System

A Tool for Systematic Visualization of Controlled Descriptors and Their Relation to Others as a Rich Context for a Discovery System

The discovery service (a search engine and service called WILBERT) used at our library at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Wildau (TUAS Wildau) is comprised of more than 8 million items. If we were to record all licensed publications in this tool to a higher level of articles, including their bibliographic records and full texts, we would have a holding estimated at a hundred million documents. A lot of features, such as ranking, autocompletion, multi-faceted classification, refining opportunities reduce the number of hits. However, it is not enough to give intuitive support for a systematic overview of topics related to documents in the library. John Naisbitt once said: “We are drowning in information, but starving for knowledge.” This quote is still very true today. Two years ago, we started to develop micro thesauri for MINT topics in order to develop an advanced indexing of the library stock. We use iQvoc as a vocabulary management system to create the thesaurus. It provides an easy-to-use browser interface that builds a SKOS thesaurus in the background. The purpose of this is to integrate the thesauri in WILBERT in order to offer a better subject-related search. This approach especially supports first-year students by giving them the possibility to browse through a hierarchical alignment of a subject, for instance, logistics or computer science, and thereby discover how the terms are related. It also supports the students with an insight into established abbreviations and alternative labels. Students at the TUAS Wildau were involved in the developmental process of the software regarding the interface and functionality of iQvoc. The first steps have been taken and involve the inclusion of 3000 terms in our discovery tool WILBERT.