Community Contribution: LC Subject Field

We are aiming to build our Research Data Management platform in a modular fashion, so that we can contribute useful parts to the Drupal community so it may be used and improved upon by others.

Our first contribution is the LC Subject Field module. The Library of Congress provides a controlled vocabulary of subject headings. LCSHs are applied to every item in a collection, and facilitate access to items in the catalogue that pertain to similar subject matter.

With this module a Drupal site administrator can attach LCSH data to content items in their site. When a user starts to enter text in the input field, suggestions will be offered up as type-ahead options so the user doesn't need to remember the exact form of the heading they wish to use. When they choose a heading from the suggestions list, the URL representing that subject field at the Library of Congress's site is automatically populated as part of the field. This will facilitate harvesting of a site's content by services like WikiData in a semantically meaningful way by having metadata that is widely-understood by other services.

According to Drupal.org's site usage reporting system, the LC Subject Field module is already installed and running on a number of sites in the week since the first release.

LC Subject Field on Drupal.org