Leveraging organizational expertise taxonomy for collection development

Organizational taxonomies have been used to organize content and aid navigation. This paper describes the experience of using an organizational expertise taxonomy and its corresponding subject matter experts, to aid collection development and to raise user awareness of the collection. Leveraging on subject matter experts in the organization provided a degree of balance to patron-driven acquisitions, and tapped on the subject matter expert’s community links to increase awareness of information resources in the collection. The use of organizational expertise descriptors to complement Library of Congress Subject Headings in the library catalogue yielded the benefits of precision and user familiarity to facilitate discovery, and resilience in case of changes to the organizational expertise taxonomy. Using the library catalogue to tag information resources to competencies is more efficient than manual updating by the subject matter experts, and provides an overview to aid collection analysis.