Page 173 - DLIS402_INFORMATION_ANALYSIS_AND_REPACKAGING

Information Analysis and Repackaging

Notes Headings referring to people and places have also been reorganized to reflect modern political
sensibilities:
Soviet Union headings have been cancelled in favour of period subdivision under Russia—History.
Indians has been re-established to denote the people of India. A number of headings for the literature
and culture of India—such as Indian music and Indian literature—have been reconciled with this
change, and new chronological subdivisions have been established for the history of India.

Subject Heading Lists

Subject headings are provided in the catalogue entries to provide subject access to information.
Cataloguers have at their disposal different Lists of Subject Headings from which they can assign
subject headings to the documents that they catalogue.

Library of Congress List of Subject Headings (LCSH) and its abridged form, the Sears
List of Subject Headings (SLSH) are the two main lists used in libraries.

The Subject Headings Lists show the semantic aspects of indexing language through See andSee
Also references. The relationships-Hierarchical and Associative are accommodated under See Also
reference. The syntax is handled by various instructions in the lists. Though subject headings lists
were developed from card catalogue and pre-coordinate indexing systems (in particular), due to
development of computerised information retrieval system, these are gradually transforming the
thesaural structure, which is developed for post coordinate systems.

Library of Congress List of Subject Headings
Library of Congress has been providing subject headings in its catalogue since 1898. The libraries
using L.C. cards requested it to publish these headings for other libraries to use. L.C. started publishing
these, when its first edition was published between 1909 and 1914. SLSH is based on Library of Congress
List of Subject Headings (LCSH) designed for small and medium sized libraries.

LCSH was published for the first time as “Subject Headings used in the Dictionary
Catalogues of the LC” between 1909 and 1914.

Later on supplements were published followed by the second edition issued in 1919. The list is in its
26th edition at present, which was published in 2003. It is in five volumes. The present editor of the
list is Ronald A. Gowdreas. The list is generated from a database accumulated since its inception.
The idea of the size of the list can be had from the fact that, it has 2.7 lakh records compared to 2.63
lakh records in LCSH 25. There are two types of headings in LCSH, those in bold face type and
those in normal type. The bold face type headings are accepted to be used as subject headings by
catalogues, others cannot be used as headings, and they guide the users to formulate the appropriate
subject headings, e.g., Fighting Use War Fighting is an example of non-bold face type heading which
is not an acceptable subject heading. This entry guides the user to choose war as the heading.

Components of an Entry

An entry in LCSH may consist of the following elements:
Scope Note (SN): It provides the meaning or context of a heading. The scope note also gives an
indication of the area of application of the heading, e.g., Art (Here are entered general works on the

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