Evolutionary S UBJECT Tagging in the Humanities Supporting Discovery and Examination in Digital Cultural Landscapes

Driven by desire to help humanities scholars more easily discover and examine information, ourearly articulations of the problem led us to explore how we might fix it. Would additional subjecttags improve discoverability? Would layering subject terms from multiple disciplines help? Isthere a way to merge them? Is translation between disciplinary thesauri required? If moresubject terms are required, could we develop a scalable (sustainable) model for providing them?Would any of the efforts to improve the discoverability of humanities texts actually facilitateenhanced examination of the texts?In this paper, the authors attempt to identify problematic issues for subject tagging, particularlythose associated with information objects in digital formats. In the third major section, theauthors identify a number of assumptions that lie behind the current practice of subjectclassification that we think should be challenged. We move then to propose features ofclassification systems that could increase their effectiveness. These emerged as recurrentthemes in many of the conversations with scholars, consultants, and colleagues. Finally, wesuggest next steps that we believe will help scholars and librarians develop better subjectclassification systems to support research in the humanities.