Teaching an Algorithm How to Catalog a Book

This paper presents a study of a strategy for automated cataloging within an OPAC or for online bibliographic catalogs generally. The aim of the analysis is to offer a set of results, while searching in library catalogs, that goes further than the expected one-to-one term correspondence. The goal is to understand how ontological structures can affect query search results. This analysis can also be applied to search functions other than in the library context, but in this case, cataloging relies on predefined rules and noncontrolled dictionary terms, which means that the results are meaningful in terms of knowledge organization. The approach was tested on an Edisco database, and we measured the system’s ability to detect whether a new incoming record belonged to a specific set of textbooks.