Journal Article

Automatic classification of older electronic texts into the Universal Decimal Classification–UDC

Kljajić Borštnar, Mirjana, Kragelj, Matjaž

2021

Overview

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to develop a model for automated classification of old digitised texts to the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC), using machine-learning methods.Design/methodology/approachThe general research approach is inherent to design science research, in which the problem of UDC assignment of the old, digitised texts is addressed by developing a machine-learning classification model. A corpus of 70,000 scholarly texts, fully bibliographically processed by librarians, was used to train and test the model, which was used for classification of old texts on a corpus of 200,000 items. Human experts evaluated the performance of the model.FindingsResults suggest that machine-learning models can correctly assign the UDC at some level for almost any scholarly text. Furthermore, the model can be recommended for the UDC assignment of older texts. Ten librarians corroborated this on 150 randomly selected texts.Research limitations/implicationsThe main limitations of this study were unavailability of labelled older texts and the limited availability of librarians.Practical implicationsThe classification model can provide a recommendation to the librarians during their classification work; furthermore, it can be implemented as an add-on to full-text search in the library databases.Social implicationsThe proposed methodology supports librarians by recommending UDC classifiers, thus saving time in their daily work. By automatically classifying older texts, digital libraries can provide a better user experience by enabling structured searches. These contribute to making knowledge more widely available and useable.Originality/valueThese findings contribute to the field of automated classification of bibliographical information with the usage of full texts, especially in cases in which the texts are old, unstructured and in which archaic language and vocabulary are used.

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited,Emerald Group Publishing Limited
• Subject: Archives & records / Art Criticism / Assignment / Automatic classification / Automation / Availability / Bibliographic Databases / Bibliographies / Classification / Colon classification / Corpus linguistics / Cultural Background / Cultural heritage / Culture / Dewey Decimal Classification / Digital libraries / Digitization / Electronic Equipment / Electronic Libraries / Electronic texts / Historical text analysis / Human performance / Learning / Librarians / Libraries / Library catalogs / Library of Congress Classification / Library Personnel / Linguistics / Machine learning / Metadata / Methodological problems / Model testing / Numbers / Periodicals / Research design / Research methodology / Resistance (Psychology) / Serials / Slavic Languages / Texts / Theology / User experience / Vocabulary / Word Processing