Defining Usefulness and Facilitating Access Based on Research Applications

This paper defines and conceptualizes the usefulness subject type, and describes means for libraries to enable discovery of resources based on user applications. Subject analysis of usefulness directly relates library resources to user needs. Cataloguing usefulness can be achieved through a combination of abstracting and indexing techniques, including cataloguer- and user-supplied metadata with specialized encoding. Accessing usefulness can be achieved through a combination of data analysis and discovery interface design.