Towards Genre Classification in the Library Catalog

Abstract

Library catalogs usually do not contain explicit information about the genre of literary works. However, both for readers and for researchers this information can be useful, e.g, when it comes to creating research corpora based on genre. In this proposal, we offer a first analysis about how genre information has been integrated in catalogs to date, train several algorithms to classify annotated instances and contrast the results to the fields from the library catalogs used as features. Our study is based on data sets from the union catalog (GVK) of the German Common Library Network(GBV).