Trouble In Paradise: Improving The Discoverability Of Circum-Caribbean Materials Through Enhanced Cataloguing Practices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis examines how the Circum-Caribbean region’s cultural and geographic complexity make it difficult to describe or index materials relevant to this region using mainstream authority controls available in galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs). The majority of widely used controls in GLAMs have Western-centralised worldviews and are rigid in nature, thereby incapable of accommodating the fluidity necessary to accurately denote the complex Circum-Caribbean. This paper applies methodologies to the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names and the West Indian Postcard Collection at the Cambridge University Library’s Royal Commonwealth Society department to argue that expanding the vocabulary and applications of an authority control can improve the discoverability of collection materials pertinent to the Circum-Caribbean. My results and observations coupled with brief reviews of two bespoke authority controls lead to recommendations on how to improve authority controls, particularly how to decolonise them and improve their usability for non-Western places and cultures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.048 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.020 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.016 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".