Hi Mark, We are also interested in providing hierarchical browsing for some of our collections, though our reasons and goals may be different from yours. We have very large book collections and want to offer users a way to navigate beyond searching/filtering or "browse all." Our idea is to use the call numbers for the books, which map to LC class and subclass, which is a hierarchy. We haven't done this yet, so I can't show you an example, but I wonder if it's something you can use for your project.
So far, we do allow users to "find similar" titles by clicking on LCSH subjects for a given book: http://dlib.nyu.edu/aco/browse/?page=1 Not sure if this type of navigation might be useful to you. Best, Carol On Wed, Apr 13, 2016 at 8:05 AM, Mark Watkins <m...@thehawaiiproject.com> wrote: > I'm interested to use the LCSH data contained in the Harvard Open Metadata > project to provide some hierarchical browsing (e.g. Fiction -> Mysteries -> > Historical Mysteries on top of a book database. > > I'm a library sciences newbie, but it seems like LCSH doesn't really > provide a formal hierarchy of genre/topic, just a giant controlled > vocabulary. Bisac seems to provide the "expected" hierarchy. > > Is anyone aware of any approaches (or better yet code!) that translates > lcsh to something like BISAC categories (either BISAC specifically or some > other hierarchy/ontology)? General web searching didn't find anything > obvious. > > Thanks! > > Mark > -- Carol Kassel Senior Manager, Digital Library Infrastructure NYU Digital Library Technology Services c...@nyu.edu (212) 992-9246 dlib.nyu.edu