Implementing FAST Facets in ContentDM

John MillardHead of Digital InitiativesMiami University LibrariesJody PerkinsMetadata LibrarianMiami University Libraries

Overview

This project explores the use of FAST facets for aContentDM collection. Miami Stories, a collection of oral histories, will serve as a test case. A tag set basedon FAST facets will be used to markup transcribed text.

Tagged data will be parsed into ContentDM elds that

mirror FAST facets. Terms will be edited and checked

against FAST authority les.

Miami Stories, a continuing oral history project focusedon Miami University history, was established as a permanentprogram of the Miami University Libraries and operates out of theUniversity Archives through the Department of Special Collectionsand Archives.The purpose of this program is threefold: 1) to initiate professionally-conducted oral history projects of relevance to the documentationof University history, 2) to store, preserve and provide access to oralhistory recordings and ensure that the content is maintained in an accessible format,and 3) to coordinate and support independent projects on campus that capture as-pects of the University’s oral history.

Faceted Application of SubjectTerminology (FAST)

From the FAST Project page at OCLC “The Library of Congress Subject Headingsschema (LCSH) is by far the most commonlyused and widely accepted subject vocabularyfor general application.The purpose of adapting the LCSH with a

simplied syntax to create FAST is to retain

the very rich vocabulary of LCSH while mak-ing the schema easier to understand, control,apply, and use.” This is a complete list of FAST Facets as listed on their website. Not all facets will be relevant for

all collections. FAST is still in beta and authority les for every facet are not yet complete. Appli

-cation guidelines are also still in development. At present our use of FAST facets is an attempt tostandardize subject level access points across collections that can easily be mapped to Dublin Core.In the future we hope to develop an automated process of checking the collected terms againstFAST.http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/fast/