Portal:Library and information science/Selected article/4
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprise 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 Subject Headings are published in five large red volumes, 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 at Library of Congress Authorities. The Library of Congress issues weekly updates. Once a library user has found the right subject headings, they are an excellent resource for finding relevant material in your library catalogue.
