| Topic: |
Survey of subject categories |
| Audience: |
Librarians, finding aid authors |
| What's Here: |
Links to subject categorizations for various sites and services |
| What you can learn: |
How to categorize information |
It is often helpful to provide supplemental information for an electronic
document such as a web page, to improve the likelihood that it will be
found. The simplest way to do this is to embed a few keywords in the document.
But where do you get these keywords? Librarians can rely on the Library
of Congress subject classification schemes, but these represent thousands
of terms arranged in a vast hierarchy. They also rely on specialized thesauri
for specific subject areas, which are more accessible, provided you are
familiar with the field from which the thesaurus arises. There are many
sites that use various categorization schemes, some derived from Dewey,
others from thesaurus designed for specific areas of interest. Here are
some small and medium sized subject categorization schemes and thesauri
available on the Internet.