Legal Research

Library of Congress Subject Heading Browser

By Simon Fodden

For me, the Library of Congress subject headings have been a source of bafflement, perplexity — and to a lesser extent, wonderment — ever since I wandered into the stacks, way back in university. I suppose the creature is a little like you and me, the product of evolution’s twists and unexpected turns working on a legacy laid down when the world was a very very different place to produce a working, if sub-optimal, just-so animal. Now, should you want to use the subject headings to actually find something, you might find a little help quite useful. Bernhard Eversberg at the Universitätsbibliothek Braunschweig created a means of searching within the subject headings via phrases or words that make sense to the ordinary person. Here’s his way of explaining the problem:

Looking for publications on French poems written by female authors, what do you enter? You can try many combinations of the words French, France, poems, poetry, women, female etc. But there is one term that was established by the Library of Congress to denote the subject in a consistent way, and that term is French poetry — Women authors — History and Criticism

His LCSH Browser helps you find the proper terms. And then it offers you links over to searches for these terms in Worldcat, Google Books, LibraryThing and OpenLibrary.

[via Law Librarian Blog via Roy Tennant]

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).