The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprise a thesaurus (in the information technology sense, a controlled vocabulary) 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.
Read more about Library Of Congress Subject Headings: An Art and A Science, LCSH Policy Issues, Using LCSH
Famous quotes containing the words library of, library, congress and/or subject:
“The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one’s children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“With sighs more lunar than bronchial,
Howbeit eluding fallopian diagnosis,
She simpers into the tribal library and reads
That Keats died of tuberculosis . . .”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Such is the labor which the American Congress exists to protect,—honest, manly toil,—honest as the day is long,—that makes his bread taste sweet, and keeps society sweet,—which all men respect and have consecrated; one of the sacred band, doing the needful but irksome drudgery.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He was at a starting point which makes many a man’s career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)