A few weeks ago we posted about a new prototype from the New York Times named “Custom Feeds.” It allows users, for free, to create “custom built” RSS feeds of NY Times content that make use of the actual tags (aka descriptors, subject headings) that humans use when meta-tagging (aka indexing). At the end of the post we even made special note that The Times took the time to point out they still uses human “meta-taggers.”

Today, the wonderful Tara Calashain has an excellent post about how The NY Times making all of the their controlled vocabulary (subject headings) available to the public. Eventually 30,000 of them will be available. As of today, approximately 5,000 personal name headings (aka tags) are online.

Tara also points out that each of the 5,000 names have direct links to RDF and XML data at DBPedia* and Freebase. She also explains that you can download the complete file of names (something a developer is likely to do) or browse and view each recrord one at a time.

Given that we’re not developers we’re going to browse them (in HTML format) online. You can view the 5000 names here. Just like the LC Authorities file has reference value by sometimes providing birthdates, when a name was first used, or a snippet about a heading the NY Times files do much the same thing.

More after the Click

The entry for Colin Powell includes:

+ A definition. A brief backgrounder about the person. Reference value.

+ There are three variants of his name (a guess)

+ The heading has been used 398 times

+ The heading was first used on October 15, 2001 (a guess, when the Times Topics pages went live)

+ The heading was last used on August 4, 2009 (a guess)*.

Here are a few other people we found in the personal name headings list:

+ Ansel Adams

+ Anne Rice
Not much info here. *But for this and all other entries looking in the record and clicking the link that goes to dbpedia.org can show you the content along with the structure of an entry in the dbpedia knowledgebase. Here’s theentry for Anne Rice.

* We’ve asked the NY Times for some help.

Sources: NY Times, ResearchBuzz
Hat Tip: S.C.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 9th, 2009 and is filed under Cataloging and Metadata, Info Management and Retrieval. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.