Lcsh

Library Congress Subject Headings

1. Library of Congress
Subject Headings
(LCSH)
Maura Walsh
Adeleine Whitman
Jessica Wilson
Tania Wisotzke
Erin Wolfe

2. Library of Congress (LC)
•De facto National
Library
•Began as Legislative
Library in 1800
•Collections totaling
more than 100
million items
•Librarian of
Congress appointed
by President (now
James H. Billington)
•Serves as:
–research library
for Congress
–US copyright
center
–Library for all
three branches of
government
–Largest public
library
–Materials in over
450 languages

3. LC Jefferson Building

4. History of LCSH
Timeline
•1897 – LC moves to new Thomas
Jefferson Building
•1898 – LC introduces dictionary
catalog; first subject headings from
ALA list
•1902 – LC begins Card Distribution
Service

5. LCSH Timeline
•1909 to 1914 – LC publishes Subject
Headings Used in the Dictionary
Catalogues of the Library of Congress
•1975 – 8
th
edition (2 volumes) published
under title Library of Congress Headings

6. LCSH Timeline
•1992 – Subject Authority Control Program
(SACO) established
•1998 – LCSH’s 100
th
Anniversary
http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/9808/lcsh-cel.html
•2007 – 30
th
edition of LCSH published; 5
volumes contain over 280,000 subject
headings

7. LCSH - The Big Red Books

8. What is the LCSH?
Controlled vocabulary
–access points to bibliographic records
–standardized records for libraries and
databases
–the most widely used subject access
system in the world

9. What is the LCSH? (cont)
•A tool to facilitate finding similar items
•Concise, precise, and specific
–Answers the question:
“What is this item about?”

10. A stairway in the Great Hall of the Library
of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building

11. Who and Why?
•Libraries
–standardization
•Catalogers and Indexers
–Categorization of materials
•Researchers
–all materials on a topic (BT, NT, UF)
•Patrons
–way to search (cross-referencing)

12. LCSH Construction
Provides three relational directions
between terms (thesaurus format):
–Equivalence (USE/UF)
–Hierarchical (BT, NT)
–Associative (RT, SA)

13. LCSH Construction (cont)
Main heading
–topical
–form or genre
–names
•personal, corporate, geographic

14. LCSH Construction (cont)
Subdivisions
–topical
–form or document type
–chronological
–geographical

15. LCSH Construction (cont)
Free-floating subdivisions
•Pattern headings

16. LCSH Construction (cont)
•Syntax and form can vary greatly
•Highly ordered and precise, but...
–User vs. consistency principles
–Stability principle

17. Inside the Library

18. Issues
•Difficult to locate information
•No natural-language searches
•No browsing
•Slow to add/change headings
•Adaptability/Flexibility
•Bias reflected in headings

19. LCSH Bias
●
Cutter's Rules
●Literary Warrant
●National and international reinforcement
of U.S. Status quo
●Gender/Culture/…

20. Library of Congress Reading Room

21. LCSH as Thesaurus
●Definition of thesaurus
●a list of words or group of words that can be used
as subject headings or descriptors in a particular
database, catalog, or index. …
●Controversy over hierarchy
●…

22. LCSH across languages

23. LCSH Across Languages
●LCSH becoming internationalized
●Positive implications
-global access
-multilingual access
●Negative implications
-English centric
-Underrepresentation
-SHs lacking equivilancy

24. LCSH in Online Catalogs
Progress
Adeleine, can you fill this in?

25. Future of LCSH?
•Possibilities
–Social collaboration
–Tagging/folksonomies (PennTags)
–Combination LCSH
–Wiki use in libraries (Ohio U. library)
–Natural language processing
–Ontologies
–Faceted Navigation