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

controlled vocabulary Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Control ...

based on the

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

(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., doing business as OCLC, 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 wa ...

, Inc., with the goal of making subject cataloging less costly and easier to implement in online contexts. FAST headings separate

topical A topical medication is a medication that is applied to a particular place on or in the body. Most often topical medication means application to body surfaces such as the skin or mucous membranes to treat ailments via a large range of classes ...

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 220px, Logo image of DCMI, which formulates Dublin Core The Dublin Core, also known as the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES), is a set of fifteen "core" elements (properties) for describing resources. This fifteen-element Dublin Core has ...

. 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 predicts the rest of a word a user is typing. In Android and iOS smartphones, this is called predictive text. In graphical user interfaces, users can typically press the ta ...

feature to assist catalogers with the details of FAST headings. OCLC has published FAST as

linked data In computing, linked data (often capitalized as Linked Data) is structured data which is interlinked with other data so it becomes more useful through semantic queries. It builds upon standard Web technologies such as HTTP, RDF and URIs, but ...

under an Open Data Commons Attribution (ODC-By) License. Organisations using the FAST vocabulary include: *

Analysis & Policy Observatory Analysis & Policy Observatory (more commonly known as APO) is a not-for-profit open access repository or digital library, specialising in public policy grey literature, mainly from Australia and New Zealand, with some coverage of other countries. ...

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the Briti ...

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of highe ...

* Informit (Australia) *

National Library of New Zealand The National Library of New Zealand ( mi, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa) is New Zealand's legal deposit library charged with the obligation to "enrich the cultural and economic life of New Zealand and its interchanges with other nations" (''Na ...

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