The following essay assignment is aimed for use in a flipped-classroom setting. Independent learners may instead resort to the many interactive tests throughout the OER.

Essay assignment: The pros and cons of professional, social and automatic subject indexing

Using a novel as an example, based on the publisher's description, consider whether subject access points in records for the selected novel are(not) appropriate. Compare using examples from the world's most extensive catalogue WorldCat, social tagging service LibraryThing, and two freely available automatic classifiers, Annif and uClassify. Using 1500-2000 words, answer the following questions:

1. Which terms do you find appropriate for each service (WorldCat, LibraryThing, Annif and uClassify)? Argue why these are good terms having in mind one or two specific groups of end users (e.g., literary scholars, the general public).

2. Are any of these services better than others? Why?

3. Based on these examples and your analysis, is professional, social or automatic subject indexing providing the best solution? If not, which combination of these would be best and why? How would you implement this combination in practice, e.g. in a library or digital humanities research project?

4. How would your conclusions based on this example translate into another type of resource, e.g., a set of AR representations of museum objects, performing arts recordings or a collection of historical newspaper articles?

5. Finally, based on your experience searching for resources in online collections (museums, libraries, archives, Europeana...), how effective are subject metadata? Are they supporting or preventing access to different information resources? If the latter, in your opinion, how could this be best improved, and if not, what kind of impact would this have on future research and development?