WindMusic, example of the new possibilities for DSpace when adding SKOS thesaurus and authority lists management

Abstract

Controling metadata through authority lists or thesauri can provide many benefits: (1)multilingual: coded metadata can be translated following the language of users (2)quality control: spelling can be checked (3) exhaustivity: users can retrieve records using synonyms or translations (4) assistance: auto-complete and facetted browsing help users specify their queries and drill-down their results (5) integration: normalizing concepts insures that different applications can be interlinked with precision and exhaustivity: a thesaurus entry can be the keyword to index bibliographic records, the title of a Wiki Page which explains the concept, the code of a chemical substance in a database (or a code in any external database). Full integration of authority lists in DSpace involves changes in submitting, cataloguing, displaying, searching and browsing. We demonstrate in depth the result of this work with www.WindMusic.org, the database of music scores and recordings for Wind Bands and Orchestras.