Automated title page cataloging: A feasibility study

摘要

The cost of original cataloging remains a substantial expense for libraries and a hindrance to rapid availability of newly published materials. We have prototyped a rule-based system to explore the impediments to automating descriptive cataloging from title pages. Our test results suggest that it is possible to capture a substantial part of the regularity in title page layout in a small set of rules. Our system correctly identified over 80% of the bibliographic fields present on a random sample of title pages. Significant unsolved problems include the difficulty of incorporating a cataloger's general knowledge about the world in such a system, the complexity and irregularity of cataloging rules, and lack of reliable data capture techniques. Nonetheless, the methods explored hold promise for advancing the state of the art in the automation of cataloging and document format recognition.