Library Of Congress Subject Headings

Presents suggested headings appropriate for use in the catalogs of small and medium-sized libraries, and provides patterns and instructions for adding new headings as they are required. The seventeenth edition features a revision of headings for the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, as well as many new subdivisions.

Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is used by more libraries worldwide than any other controlled vocabulary system. Yet, many librarians and paraprofessional staff do not have any formal education or training in LCSH. They find themselves having to decipher or construct LCSH strings and don’t know where to begin. Here’s a resource that uses language non-catalogers can understand and provides hands-on, user-friendly training in LCSH. Here Karen Snow transfers her popular LCSH workshops and continuing education courses to book form for those who can’t attend her courses. This book offers material on the basics of subject analysis, the importance of controlled vocabularies, and the main features and principles of LCSH. It explains and provides guidance on the application of LCSH. Library of Congress’ instruction manual for LCSH, the Subject Headings Manual, is discussed at length. Several chapters concentrate on assigning LCSH to resources of a certain focus or genre: fiction works, biographical works (or works that focus heavily on a certain person or their works), and resources that emphasize a geographic location. A separate chapter on encoding subject information in the Machine-Readable Cataloging (MARC) standard will be particularly useful for library staff. Most chapters contain exercises (with answers at the end of the book) that test a reader’s understanding of the chapter material and provide opportunities to practice applying LCSH and subdivisions.

Everything we need to know about metadata, the usually invisible infrastructure for information with which we interact every day. When “metadata” became breaking news, appearing in stories about surveillance by the National Security Agency, many members of the public encountered this once-obscure term from information science for the first time. Should people be reassured that the NSA was “only” collecting metadata about phone calls—information about the caller, the recipient, the time, the duration, the location—and not recordings of the conversations themselves? Or does phone call metadata reveal more than it seems? In this book, Jeffrey Pomerantz offers an accessible and concise introduction to metadata. In the era of ubiquitous computing, metadata has become infrastructural, like the electrical grid or the highway system. We interact with it or generate it every day. It is not, Pomerantz tell us, just “data about data.” It is a means by which the complexity of an object is represented in a simpler form. For example, the title, the author, and the cover art are metadata about a book. When metadata does its job well, it fades into the background; everyone (except perhaps the NSA) takes it for granted. Pomerantz explains what metadata is, and why it exists. He distinguishes among different types of metadata—descriptive, administrative, structural, preservation, and use—and examines different users and uses of each type. He discusses the technologies that make modern metadata possible, and he speculates about metadata's future. By the end of the book, readers will see metadata everywhere. Because, Pomerantz warns us, it's metadata's world, and we are just living in it.

A Practical Guide to Library of Congress Classification is a hands-on introduction to LC Classification. The book examines each part of the LCC call number and how it is assembled and guides the reader through each step of finding and constructing LCC class numbers in Classification Web (the primary resource used to access LCC). Chapter coverage is complete: 1. Introduction 2. Library of Congress Classification in a Nutshell 3. Breaking Down the Library of Congress Call Number 4. Dates 5. Cutters 6. LCC in Classification Web 7. Basic LCC Call Number Building 8. Advanced Call Number Building 9. Classifying Fiction in LCC 10. Finding and using LCC Resources Exercises at the end of most chapters give readers immediate practice with what they just learned. Answers to the exercises are provided at the end of the book. By the end of the book readers will be able to build an LCC call number on their own.

Provides a listing of subject headings applied by the Library of Congress to children's materials, each followed by the most appropriate classifiction number(s), based on the Abridged Dewey Decimal Classification, Edition 13; and includes a keyword index.

This book is designed to teach you how to read and understand the handwriting found in documents commonly used in genealogical research. It explains techniques for reading early American documents, provides samples of alphabets and letter forms, and defines terms and abbreviations commonly used in early American documents such as wills, deeds, and church records.