The coverage of information science and knowledge organization in the Library of Congress Subject Headings
| Date | 19 April 2023 |
| Pages | 1265-1284 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-11-2022-0256 |
| Published date | 19 April 2023 |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
| Author | Jonathan Furner,Birger Hjørland |
The coverage of information
science and knowledge
organization in the Library of
Congress Subject Headings
Jonathan Furner
Department of Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles,
Los Angeles, California, USA, and
Birger Hjørland
Department of Communication, University of Copenhagen,
Copenhagen, Denmark
Abstract
Purpose –This article examines the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is the most used
subject heading system in the world and an instance of a controlled vocabulary (CV).
Design/methodology/approach–The method used to examine the system is based on both authors’subject
knowledge in the field of information science (IS) and the subfield of knowledge organization (KO).
Core concepts in this domain were examined (1) by checking if they are present or not in the system; (2) if not, by
determining whether LCSH contains alternative terms useful for searching documents about the missing
concept, by examining books indexed by the Library of Congress; (3) by identifying the semantic relations
between subject headings.
Findings –The results demonstrate fundamental problems in the logical consistency of the representation
of IS and KO in LCSH.
Practical implications –The implications for CVs in general are discussed.
Originality/value –No previous study has used our method to examine LCSH’s coverage of IS.
Keywords Controlled vocabulary, Indexing, Information science, Knowledge organization, LCSH, Library
of Congress Subject Headings, Subject heading
Paper type Article
1. Introduction
In the age of Google –i.e. a ubiquitous search engine that enables free text searching and
employs statistical and link-based methods of information retrieval –the continued relevance
of controlled vocabularies (CVs) has often been called into question, especially by computer
scientists (see, e.g. Salton, 1996, p. 333). At the same time, many researchers in library and
information science (LIS) seem to take for granted the value of CVs for library resource
discovery, in particular in domains such as evidence-based medicine. In reality, the situation
is more nuanced than either view would suggest, as Rowley (1994, p. 114) recognizes [1].
There cannot be a general conclusion about the utility of CVs; utility in an individual case
depends on the quality of the CV in question.
In this paper, we assess the quality of one CV –namely, Library of Congress Subject
Headings (LCSH) –in the context of one domain in which we share expertise –namely,
information science (IS), which encompasses knowledge organization (KO) inter alia [2]. LCSH
is the world’s most widely used CV for the subject headings that appear in library catalog
records. Several methods of evaluating LCSH have been proposed, one of which is to assess
the usefulness of LCSH for finding library resources on topics with which one is familiar.
The idea that we pursue in this paper is to leverage our subject knowledge of the domain of IS
in an examination of the value of LCSH for identifying books on conceptions of information
Library of
Congress
Subject
Headings
1265
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
https://www.emerald.com/insight/0022-0418.htm
Received 29 November 2022
Revised 14 February 2023
Accepted 17 February 2023
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 79 No. 5, 2023
pp. 1265-1284
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-11-2022-0256
and of IS. (In addition, IS is a subject field in which we would not expect the staff of the Library
of Congress, LC, to be ignorant.) IS, like many scholarly fields, is characterized by a specific
terminology. In this paper, we examine how some of the core terms used in IS are represented
in LCSH and used in indexing.
IS and KO were chosen because the authors have subject knowledge in the field. Very
seldom do subject experts review knowledge organization systems (KOSs) or indexing done
in bibliographic databases. Although LCSH ’s performance in one domain may not
necessarily serve as a generalizable indicator of its performance in other domains, a poor
performance would nonetheless indicate that a certain level of quality control is missing, and
this may be part of a general problem. We hope that our study inspires others to conduct
similar studies in other fields.
2. LCSH: history and criticism
Subject headings are words, phrases or sequences of words or phrases that stand for the
topics covered by individual bibliographic items such as books and journal articles. A list of
subject headings is a tool used by catalogers and indexers in selecting the appropriate
headings for assignment to books and articles, and by searchers seeking to identify material
relevant to their information needs. The primary function of a list of subject headings is to
implement vocabulary control, i.e. to identify which of a set of synonymous terms is the term
that is preferred for usage as a heading by indexers and searchers, and to indicate the
existence of semantic relationships among terms that differ in meaning. Compilers of such
lists endeavor to match the semantic structure of the list to the structure implicit in the
literature to be indexed; the broader the scope of that literature, the more difficult it becomes
(or so it might be argued) to engineer a good match. One list in particular has an especially
wide remit. LCSH originated in 1898 when LC adopted the American Library Association’s
List of Subject Headings for Use in Dictionary Catalogs (American Library Association, 1895)
as the basis for its own list. The first edition of LC’s list was published in parts between 1910
and 1914 as Subject Headings Used in the Dictionary Catalogues of the Library of Congress
(Library of Congress, 1910–1914). The title of this list became Library of Congress Subject
Headings with the 8th edition (Library of Congress, 1975). At the time of writing, LCSH is in its
44th edition (Library of Congress, 2022), is freely available online, and contains 382,713
headings.
Olson (2000, p. 54) calls LCSH a “device of cultural authority”. Its intended audience is
made up of users of LC, together with users of libraries throughout the United States that
receive the digital catalog records disseminated by LC. It is also used around the world, either
in its English version (also by many libraries receiving the digital records) or in translation [3].
Catalogers at libraries that have a cooperative agreement with LC (i.e. that are participants in
the Subject Authority Cooperative Program) may propose changes to LCSH. The Library of
Congress Subject Cataloging Division reviews proposals for new headings, considering two
main questions: Is the revision warranted? [4] Is it congruent with the existing structure?
LCSH is continuously revised (updated daily in the digital version available through
Classification Web), expanding at the rate of approximately 4,000 headings each year.
The LCSH system is the subject of a historical treatment by Miksa (1983), as well as
several practical guides to the application of subject headings in resource description and the
use of subject headings in resource discovery: see, for example, Chan (2005),Broughton
(2012),Mann (2015, chapters 2, 4 and 5), Snow (2021) and Markey and Knott (2023, chapter 6)
[5]. Teaching in LIS about LCSH is often limited to the practical issues treated in such
textbooks: What is the structure of the system? How should headings be selected for
application to library resources? How should headings be used in searching? But LIS should
also be about how to improve systems, and for this purpose theoretical, empirical and critical
JD
79,5
1266
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