Page 131 - DLIS405_INFORMATION_STORAGE_AND_RETRIEVAL

Information Storage and Retrieval

Notes 3. The ...... edition of the Sears list of subject headings melds the traditional with the new.
(a) 14th (b) 16th
(c) 18th (d) 19th

13.2 Library of Congress Subject Headings

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprises a thesaurus (in the information
technology sense) of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use
in bibliographic records. LC Subject Headings are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is
the function by which libraries collect, organize and disseminate documents. LCSHs are applied to
every item within a library’s collection, and facilitate a user’s access to items in the catalogue that
pertain to similar subject matter. If users could only locate items by ‘title’ or other descriptive fields,
such as ‘author’ or ‘publisher’, they would have to expend an enormous amount of time searching for
items of related subject matter, and undoubtedly miss locating many items because of the ineffective
and inefficient search capability.
The Library of Congress subject headings system was originally designed as a controlled vocabulary
for representing the subject and form of the books and serials in the Library of Congress collection,
with the purpose of providing subject access points to the bibliographic records contained in the
Library of Congress catalogues.
As an increasing number of other libraries have adopted the Library of Congress subject headings
system, it has become a tool for subject indexing of library catalogs in general. In recent years, it has
also been used as a tool in a number of online bibliographic databases outside of the Library of
Congress.
A subject heading may consist of one or more words. A one-word heading represents a single concept,
whereas a multiple-word heading may represent a single concept or multiple concepts.
A subject heading representing a single concept may appear as a single word or a multiple-word
phrase, usually an adjectival phrase but occasionally a prepositional phrase. Each such heading
represents a single object or idea (Examples include: Automobiles, Botany, Budget deficits, Electric
interference, Boards of trade, Clerks of court).

How do you consider Library of Congress Subject Headings as an Art?

An Art and a Science

Subject heading classification is a human and intellectual endeavor, where trained professionals apply
topic descriptions to items in their collections. Naturally, every library may choose to categorize the
subject matter of their items differently, without a uniform consentaneous standard. The widespread
use and acceptance of the Library of Congress Subject Headings facilitates the uniform access and
retrieval of items in any library in the world using the same search strategy and LCSH thesaurus, if
the correct headings have been applied to the item by the library.

LCSH decisions involve a great amount of debate and even controversy in the
library community.

Despite LCSH’s wide-ranging and comprehensive scope, there are libraries where the use of LCSH
is not ideal or effective. To deal with these types of collections and user communities, other subject
headings may be required. The United States National Library of Medicine developed Medical
Subject Headings (MeSH) to use on its many health science databases and collection. Many university

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