Subject Classification
The use of a defined subject classification schemes in institutional repositories is optional and an interesting debate has emerged as to the value of doing so. Some question spending time on classifying content within repositories when the full text of the items being included will be indexed? Some question assigning free-text keywords in metadata when the indexing mechanism will do the job automatically. Alternatively others may argue that the use of an official classification scheme will improve subject discovery of content, in particular offering better ways of browsing items within the repository. There is a stronger argument for investing time to subject classify media such as images, sound files and video as full text searching is not going to be useful for these formats. The choice of whether to use an official scheme lies with the institution itself and will largely depend on resources available to spend time inputting metadata and the level of mediation planned in the content ingest workflow. At the root of this are questions regarding whether or not academics have the time, or inclination, to use an official classification scheme, and, if it is a valuable use of the repository administrator's time to classify all incoming content.
In practice, there is a range of ways of indicating the subject matter of the content. The most common approaches are:
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Subject classification - using a library-based scheme such as Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Subject Headings. Within particular subjects there are detailed classification schemas such as Medical Subject Headings (MeSH)
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Course classification - using a scheme such as Joint Academic Coding System (JACS)
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Departmental classification - assigning repository items to department/research groups
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Informal classification - allowing uncontrolled vocabularies/'folksonomies' /user-generated tagging
These approaches can be used in combination, so that for example, a contributor tags their content with whichever terms they think are useful, and the content inherits the contributor's department as an additional classification. A repository officer might then assign a JACS term to it as well.
