Project description

Multilingual Access to Subject (MACS) was a joint project by the Swiss National Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the British Library and the German National Library. It involved the linkage of equivalent subject headings from the LCSH (Library of Congress Subject Headings), RAMEAU (Répertoire d'autorité-matière encyclopédique et alphabétique unifié) and the GND (Integrated Authority File), originally the SWD (Schlagwortnormdatei - Subject Headings Authority File).

Results

During the MACS project, a cross-concordance was generated and initially maintained in a linkage database LMI; it was first published in RDF (n-triples) format in 2016: macs-2016-09-14.nt.gz; 223,794 triples; CC BY 4.0 (former website: https://www.dnb.de/EN/voclink).

The linking methodology was developed still further in the DFG's parallel project CrissCross 2006-2010.
Since then, terminology experts from the Swiss and German National Libraries have been continuing the mapping process in close cooperation with the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Library of Congress.
Data maintenance and the integration of the data into the GND have been the subjects of various follow-up projects realised by the German National Library, e.g. GND-mul (2021-2022).

The most recent mapping is made available at https://data.dnb.de/opendata/ as a data dump in RDF format (various serialisations) and can be used free of charge and is provided under the following designation: mapping-authorities-gnd-lcsh-rameau_lds.{jsonld | nt | rdf | ttl}.gz

Project framework

Funding Body

Conference of European National Librarians (CENL)

Coordination

Swiss National Library (NB)

Partners

• Swiss National Library (NB)
• Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF)
• British Library (BL)
• German National Library (DNB)

Duration

1997 - 2016

Further information

• Patrice Landry: Multilingual Subject Access: The Linking Approach of MACS. - 2004. - Online Ressource. - (In: Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 37. 177-191).
• Yvonne Jahns, Helga Karg: Translingual Retrieval: Moving between vocabularies MACS 2010. – (In: Concepts in context: Proceedings of the Cologne Conference on Interoperability and Semantics in Knowledge Organization July 19th - 20th, 2010. Eds.: F. Boteram, W. Gödert u. J. Hubrich. Würzburg: Ergon, 2011. S.51-68. - Bibliotheca Academica - Reihe Informations- und Bibliothekswissenschaften; Bd. 1).
• Mapping GND – LCSH
• Mapping GND – RAMEAU

Terms of use and provision

Detailed information on terms of use and provision is given here.

Contact

• metadatendienste@dnb.de (metadata supply)
• GND-Mappings@dnb.de (cross-concordance editorial team)