Subject access in children's libraries: children's vocabulary and conceptual structures

Abstract

The paper describes the information seeking process and subject access to library's documents focusing on a very specific kind of users: children. When dealing with the searching process, children must face two different kind of problems: those faced by any user while searching the catalogue, and those resulting from the fact that neither the organization nor the query systems are suitable to their way of understanding the world and interacting with it. Several studies on children's information seeking stress the benefits and limitations of both keyword searching and browsing, and show the necessity of creating systems able to meet the real needs of young users. It has also been proved that traditional controlled vocabularies cannot meet the information needs of this kind of users, and that their own terminology should be used in order to improve them. The project developed by the Centro Internacional del Libro Infantil y Juvenil was aimed to improve the center's list of authorities in order to make them more suitable both to the library's collection and to the users' language. The center's young users were asked to take part in the project in order to find their actual query words and the relationships they create among different concepts. Finally, the catalogue of the center was updated according to the research's results and to the national and international standards for the creation of controlled vocabularies.