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Unit 13: Subject Headings

libraries may not apply both LCSH and MeSH headings to items. In Canada, the National Library Notes
of Canada worked with LCSH representatives to create a complementary set of Canadian Subject
Headings (CSH) to access and express the topic content of documents on Canada and Canadian
topics.

13.3 LCSH Policy Issues

Historically, issues have revolved around the terms employed to describe racial or ethnic groups.
Notable has been the terms used to describe African-Americans. Until the 1990s, the LCSH
administrators had a strict policy of not changing terms for a subject category. This was enforced to
tighten and eliminate the duplication or confusion that might arise if subject headings were changed.
Therefore, one term to describe African-American topics in LCSH was ‘Afro-American’ long after
that term lost currency and acceptance in the population. LCSH decided to allow some alteration of
terms in 1996 to better reflect the needs and access of library users. Nevertheless, many common
terms, or ‘natural language’ terms are not used in LCSH, and may in effect limit the ability for users
to locate items. There is a growing tradition of research in Library and Information Science faculties
about the cultural and gender biases that affect the terms used in LCSH, which in turn may limit or
deprive library users access to information stored and disseminated in collections. A notable
American Library Science scholar on this subject is Sanford Berman.

Data Access

The Subject Headings are published in large red volumes (currently five), which are typically displayed
in the reference sections of research libraries. They may also be searched online in the Library of
Congress Classification Web, a subscription service, or free of charge (as individual records) at Library
of Congress Authorities. The Library of Congress issues weekly updates. The data is published for a
fee by the Cataloguing Distribution Service.

A web service, lcsh.info, was set up by Ed Summers, a Library of Congress employee,
circa April 2008,[1] using SKOS to allow for simple browsing of the subject headings.
lcsh.info was shut down by the Library of Congress’s order on December 18, 2008.
This announcement was met with great dismay from the library science and semantic web
communities, e.g., Tim Berners-Lee and Tim Spalding of LibraryThing. After some delay, the Library
did set up its own web service for LCSH browsing at id.loc.gov in April 2009.

Using LCSH

Once a library user has found the right subject heading(s), they are an excellent resource for finding
relevant material in your library catalogue. Increasingly the use of hyperlinked, web-based Online
Public Access Catalogues, or OPACs, allow users to hyperlink to a list of similar items displayed by
LCSH once one item of interest is located. However, because LCSH are not necessarily expressed in
natural language, many users may choose to search OPACs by keywords. Moreover, users unfamiliar
with OPAC searching and LCSH, may incorrectly assume their library has no items on their desired
topic, if they chose to search by ‘subject’ field, and the terms they entered do not strictly conform to
a LCSH. For example ‘body temperature regulation’ is used in place of ‘thermoregulation’. Thus
the easiest way to find and use LCSH is to start with a ‘keyword’ search and then look at the Subject
Headings of a relevant item to locate other related material.
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) provides an alphabetical listing of authorized or
preferred terms established by the Library of Congress. These “official” terms make searching for

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