Faceted taxonomies for the performing arts domain: The case of the European collected library of artistic performance

Abstract

The exponential growth of online cultural content presents performing arts heritage institutions with the necessity of adopting new strategies in order to ensure the authentication, utility, and re-usability of both their non-book materials and their textual documents. The case study of a performing arts digital library is described through an interdisciplinary perspective in order to demonstrate the advantages deriving from the application of knowledge organization to the performing arts domain. The article illustrates how controlled vocabularies and faceted taxonomies can improve end-users' access and foster the clustering and the contextualization of performing arts documents. The paper also outlines how shared vocabularies may support transnational dialogue between various cultural repositories and network different types of items. A model for indexing, organizing, and displaying resources within a domain-specific digital library is proposed.