Doing Research at the Library of Congress
II. Searching the Catalog With Library of Congress Subject Headings
When you wish to search the Library's
online catalog by subject, you have
to come up with the correct headings appropriate to your topic. Often, the
category terms used by the catalog are not the same as the keywords you
might think of on your own. For example, books on "test tube babies" are
not found under that phrase; the proper term is Fertilization in vitro,
Human.
Similarly, the heading for books on resistance movements in Italy in World
War II does not use the word "resistance"; the proper term is World
War,
1939-1945--Underground movements--Italy and its various subdivisions.
Books on multinational corporations are grouped under the term International
business enterprises. Works on "moonshining" are cataloged
under
the heading Distilling, illicit. Searching the catalog by any
keywords other than these exact headings will result in your missing most of
the books on
these topics.
The Library's purpose in creating standardized subject headings
is to round up works on a particular subject in one place, so that
you will not
have to think up endless keyword synonyms and variant phrases, or foreign
language terms, that authors have used in their titles. Books on the subject
of the Bay of Pigs invasion, for example, have titles such as the following:
October 1962: The "Missile" Crisis as Seen
from Cuba
For Which He Stands: The True Tale of the CIA, Castro, and a Catholic
Kennedy's Wars: Berlin, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam
Bahía de Cochinos: lo que no diho el informe del inspector de la CIA
Inspector General's Survey of the Cuban Operation
and Associated Documents
Reminiscences of William T. Smoot
Batalla Inevitable: la más colosal operación de la CIA
contra Fidel Castro
Crises à Cuba: 1961-1962
Diario de Girón
Girón en la Memoria
Los Combates de Playa Larga
Havana Inquiry
Give Us This Day
Kennedy et la Révolution Cubaine
Baia dei Porci
Operation Pluto: Die Geschichte einer Invasion
Cuban Invasion: The Chronicle of a Disaster
All of these (and many other) variant title-keyword books are rounded up
under the single subject heading Cuba--History--Invasion, 1961.
Of the
nearly ninety catalog records under this heading, more than half do not
use the words "Bay of Pigs" in their titles or note fields--and so would
be
entirely missed by a keyword search on that phrase.
The most important point is this: subject headings are not the same thing
as keywords. The former are standardized terms that are artificially created
and
added to catalog records (not merely transcribed from the books themselves)
by professional catalogers, in order to create retrievable points of commonality
among topically related records that would otherwise be widely scattered
by their many different keywords. The approved list of these terms is
called Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH);
it is an annually revised multivolume set of books, often referred to simply
as "the red books" because
the binding of the set is always of that color. The primary purpose of LCSH is
to provide standardized English-language subject category terms that can be used
to bring together in convenient groups the literature of the world--no matter
how great its variation in title keywords, and no matter what the original language
of the works being cataloged--so that materials on the
same subject can be noticed and retrieved together.
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