47. évfolyam, 2001. 4. szám

Archívum

The idea of setting up a professional committee the aim of which would be to examine the chances of the elaboration of a common subject retrieval system, that supported the searching of various library, bibliographic and other databases in the frames of a central service, occurred in Spring, 2001 at a meeting of the representatives of the Ministry of National Cultural Heritage, the Hungarian National Union Catalogue (MOKKA), and the national library. The committee (Subject Heading Committee) made a proposition regarding the tools of subject retrieval. The members of the committee have formed a consortium in order to be able to realise the conception, and submitted an application to the Government Committee on Information of the Prime Minister's Office. The conception included the elaboration of a broad information retrieval language dictionary that would be a cooperative system of sub-dictionaries, in which one of the dictionaries would be distinguished, but from the point of view of the user, the participating lists would be equal, and the bibliographic databases of participants could be searched with the same search interface. That is to say, MÁTRIKSZ would be the common dictionary of participating systems, forming a separate subject heading database, that would be independent from the databases of the participants, but would serve for searching them. The author shows the method of common searching and the use of the distinguished dictionary. The existing systems at the time of starting the MÁTRIKSZ are the following: the National Széchényi Library's thesaurus, the LCSH adaptation of the Debrecen University Library, the traditional subject heading list of the Szeged University Library, and the alphabetic index of the UDC. The article deals with the relation to UDC, describes the user software, and the interface as well as the technological background. The terms of the dictionary can be exported and imported in the HUNMARC/USMARC data exchange format for filing data elements. The unified database will start its operation in April, 2002 containing 113,000 subject terms. The way of development is unification, the further elaboration of equivalences, the enrichment of the services provided by the software, and the broadening of the scope of retrievable databases.

Országos Széchényi Könyvtár Észrevételek