“It’s Hard to Find Something When You Don’t Know What You’re Looking For…”Subject Guides for Archival and Manuscript Collection

Wendy PflugOctober 22, 2011

Research Guide to AIS Collections

LibGuides as Subject GuidesCreated 5 LibGuides,

representing major themes in our collections:◦Business ◦Environmental ◦Government, Political and Social

Activists ◦Organizations, Local Societies and

Institutional Records◦Labor and Working Class History

LibGuides as Subject Guide

LibGuide Use

Faceted Browsing of Finding AidsUsers could find

items on more than one dimension

Discover collections without using a specific keyword

Allow for browsing collections in a format that was more than a list

Subject HeadingsIdea to use

existing subject headings to create word cloud

Problem: too many terms

Solution: “Tags” to define and/or limit vocabulary to apply uniformly

EAD XML ExportWhen EAD XML subject heading is

exported from Archivists’ Toolkit:

<subject source=“lcsh”>Astronomers—Pennsylvania—Pittsburgh</subject>

EAD Code Tags ExportWhen Tags are exported from

Archivists’ Toolkit:

<subject source=“ulstag”> Personal papers</subject>

JSON Data File

Our ProcessStep 1: EAD gets fed through the

XSLT Style Sheet. Output = Tab delimited text file

Step 2: Tab delimited text gets converted to comma separated text (CSV)

Step 3: Python script converts CSV to JSON file

Step 4: HTML file interacts with JSON

ULS Tags TermsArchitectureAssociationsBusiness &

IndustryChurches &

SynagoguesEducationEnvironmentGovernment

LaborPersonal PapersPoliticsSocial ActionTransportationUniversity of

PittsburghWomen

Browse Feature on Home Page

What We LearnedGoal: subject guides as way for

researchers to browse collections

LibGuides more useful as an instructional tool than as a subject guide

Faceted browsing of finding aids met our users’ needs the best