Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST) is a general use

controlled vocabulary A controlled vocabulary provides a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. Controlled vocabularies are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri, taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled v ...

based on the

Library of Congress Subject Headings The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprise a thesaurus (information retrieval), thesaurus (in the information science sense, a controlled vocabulary) of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use ...

(LCSH). FAST is developed as a part of

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

OCLC OCLC, Inc. See also: is an American nonprofit cooperative organization "that provides shared technology services, original research, and community programs for its membership and the library community at large". It was founded in 1967 as the ...

, Inc., with the goal of making subject cataloging less costly and easier to implement in online contexts. FAST headings separate topical data from non-topical data, such as information about a document's form, chronological coverage, or geographical coverage. Unlike LCSH headings, which are pre-coordinated (multiple terms are linked together by the cataloger in a specific order, e.g. "United States -- History"), FAST headings are post-coordinated (terms are singly assigned, so the user can mix and match, e.g. "United States" and "History").

Use

OCLC has been developing FAST since 1998, and originally intended the system to describe Web resources in simple metadata schemata, particularly Dublin Core. FAST separates headings into eight distinct facets: topical, geographic, personal name, corporate name, form, chronological, title as subject, and meeting name. Each facet can be mapped to a specific Dublin Core element. For example, the geographic facet can be mapped to the ''coverage'' element in the basic Dublin Core Metadata Element Set, and to the ''coverage.geographic'' element in qualified Dublin Core. In keeping with Dublin Core's simplicity, FAST headings are meant to be "simple and easy to apply and to comprehend." To facilitate subject assignment, OCLC has developed a tool called ''assignFast''. This tool uses an

autocomplete Autocomplete, or word completion, is a feature in which an application software, application predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android (operating system), Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical us ...

feature to assist catalogers with the details of FAST headings. OCLC has published FAST as linked data under an Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-By) License. Organisations using the FAST vocabulary include: * Analysis & Policy Observatory *

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom. Based in London, it is one of the largest libraries in the world, with an estimated collection of between 170 and 200 million items from multiple countries. As a legal deposit li ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1636 and named for its first benefactor, the History of the Puritans in North America, Puritan clergyma ...

* Informit (Australia) * National Library of New Zealand The FAST Policy and Outreach Committee (FPOC) was established in 2018.

Details

The FAST authority file contains over 1,700,000 authority records.

Reception

FAST's chronological periods have been critiqued as making little sense outside the context of full LCSH. An OCLC study showed that several libraries that had adopted FAST were impressed by its "ease of use, simple syntax, ndsuitability for use by non-specialist staff." However, several libraries in the same study were discouraged by a lack of communication with OCLC.

References

External links

Official siteFAST as linked data
{{Authority control Library cataloging and classification Thesauri