ALIA West

October 2003

ALIA Local Studies (WA Group)

Workshop 12 September 2003

Unlocking your collection:
subject headings for local studies

The Local Studies Group (WA) workshop held recently attracted over 30 participants from local studies collections and archives as well as individuals interested in the development of subject headings or a thesaurus related specifically to local studies.

The keynote speaker was Alison Kingscote, the co-ordinator of the Australian Pictorial Thesaurus (APT) with the State Library of NSW. Alison"s interesting and informative paper focused on the development of the APT and how it is being maintained. Alison also provided information on how to access and use the APT online. Brian Stewart from the Battye Library at the State Library of WA, presented a paper which focused on subject indexing and the need to index with the collection and users in mind.

These presentations were then followed by a practitioner"s panel where practitioners from different collections related their experiences with indexing their unique collections. Speakers included Julie Coxall from Bunbury who related their experiences with adopting the APAIS Thesaurus as their controlled language. Janet Tombleson from Augusta-Margaret River explained how their records are indexed as part of the Records Management system for the Shire. Lise Summers from the State Records Office of WA and Pam Hartree from the Heritage Council of WA also discussed their experiences with indexing specialist collections.

After an enjoyable lunch, which also provided an opportunity for networking, there was a joint presentation by Maggie Exon and Chris Richardson from Curtin University. They offered some practical ideas for the future development of specialist subject headings or a thesaurus for local studies. Finally, there was an all together panel which fielded questions from the floor which helped to clarify some of the information presented throughout the workshop.

Feedback from the workshop has been positive and thanks to all who participated and helped to make the event such a success.

Several of the papers presented at the workshop will be published in the December issue of Local-Link. Please contact the editor, Pam Hartree (please remove '.nospam' from address) if you would like to subscribe, ph 08 9354 1860.