Can you guess which of these is the real subject heading?
- child cartographers – Montana – fiction
- girls – girls who like pop music – fiction
- gifted boys – Montana -fiction
Almost every book is assigned Library of Congress subject headings when published. As the LoC explains “Authority records enable librarians to provide uniform access to materials in library catalogs and to provide clear identification of authors and subject headings. For example, works about ‘movies’,'motion pictures,’ ‘cinema,’ and ‘films’ are all entered under the established subject heading ‘Motion pictures.’” You can find the Library of Congress subject headings for a book on the back of the title page (the verso) or in the library catalog.
Very few authors add their own subject headings to their books. The image below shows the verso page for new book The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet. Scroll down for the catalog record and “real” subject headings. Who’s to say which makes more sense? Is it time for the LoC to add “The Oregon Trail video game for the Apple IIGS – fiction” to the authority records?
Monday, 29. June 2009
I was curious about the subject heading Bildungsromans, so looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, which said, “A novel that has as its main theme the formative years or spiritual education of one person (a type of novel traditional in German literature). Hence Bildungs(roman)-hero, the main character in such a novel.” There are 56 entries for this genre in the Libraries’ catalog.