I am Joseph Miller, and I am an employee of the H. W. Wilson Company, where I edit the Sears List of Subject Headings and also work in the subject authorities department. In the subject authorities department we deal with the hundreds of thousands of subject headings used by all the Wilson indexes. The Sears List, on the other hand, is a list of subject headings for small libraries along the lines of the Library of Congress Subject headings with one major difference. That is, it is not tied to the collection of any one library, and it does not attempt to be a in any way complete. It is instead a skeleton list of all the most common headings with general references containing instruction with examples for creating further headings as needed. For instructions, read standards or guidelines.
Before I go any further I want to set the set the background a little for what we will be talking about on this panel. First of all, what is subject cataloging and why is it so complicated? All library work is a matter of the storage and retrieval of information, and cataloging and indexing are that aspect of library work devoted to storage. (I will be talking here about cataloging and indexing here more or less interchangeably.) The best cataloging is that which facilitates the most accurate and complete retrieval. Descriptive cataloging makes possible the retrieval of materials in a library by title, author, date, etc. -- in short all the searchable elements of a cataloging record except the subjects. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, descriptive cataloging was the only library cataloging that was found necessary. Libraries were much smaller than they are today, and scholarly librarians then were able, with the aid of printed bibliographies, to be familiar with everything available on a given subject and guide the users to it. With the rapid growth of knowledge in many fields in the course of the nineteenth century and the resulting increase in the volume of books and periodicals, it became desirable to do a preliminary subject analysis of such works and then represent them in the catalog or in printed indexes in such a way that they could be retrievable by subject. Subject cataloging, then, deals with what a book or other library item is about, and the purpose of subject cataloging is to list under one uniform word or phrase all the materials on a given topic that a library has in its collection. A subject heading is that uniform word or phrase used in the library catalog to express a topic. The use of authorized words or phrases only, with cross-reference from unauthorized synonyms, is the essence of bibliographic control in subject cataloging.
There are two reasons why subject cataloging is complicated. The first is simply that the world and most things in it are complicated. If you don't believe that, wait until I tell you about the internet. And the second is that the English language is very tricky. There are two requirements of good subject headings. One is that they conform to common usage, and the other that they are clear and unambiguous. The only problem is that common usage is not always clear and unambiguous. In English many words mean two or three things. Look at a simple word like Eggs. In common usage it means Hen's eggs unless otherwise specified, and then it means eggs in general or as specified the eggs of any other oviparous animal. There is really no answer to this problem. You can require that someone interested in turtle's eggs go to Turtles, which is then subdivided by Eggs, but when someone wants materials about hen's eggs they want to go directly to Eggs. Why do some people call something Architecture and the next person calls it Buildings. I think the slipperiest word in the English language is History. Everyone knows what it means, but no one can define it. Is it the past, or anything in the past, or only the study of the past. Everything becomes the past sooner or later.
The Sears List is an authority file. Likewise LCSH, the Art and Architecture thesaurus, and many others. At the Wilson company, we produce many difference specialized indexes and catalogs, such as the Art Index, Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature, Business Periodicals Literature, Humanities Index, Social Science Index, General Science Index, Applied Science and Technology Index, Education Index, Library Literature, and more. Every index has its own authority file, in part because of their specialized needs, an in part because before the days of electronic information each index was an island unto itself and the only consistency required was an internal consistency within each index. Now, however, while we still sell the indexes separately, both on paper and in electronic form, we have merged the file in a number of combined products, and also our customers can mount our indexes on their opacs and search across several files at once. Now a new kind of consistency is required, and to implement that consistency a whole new set of guidelines and standards for the whole company. This is the job of the Subject Authorities department, of which Pat Kuhr is the head and I one of her assistants. This department has been in operation for about ten years, and I can hardly begin to tell you some of the problems we have faced and continue to face. When we find variant formulations of the same concept we merge the records in a centralized authority file, which maps the approved heading onto the bibliographic records in our merged databases. But things are not all simple, because of the difference subject focus and audience of the various indexes. The users of Index to Legal Periodicals are lawyers, while the users of Readers' Guide for Young People are children. In Library Literature administration means library administration. In Education Index the same word, Administration, means school administration. All the indexes have a heading for Museums and art galleries, but only Art Index has a heading for Commercial art galleries, which means that everyone else is putting material on commercial art galleries under Museums and art galleries. For seemingly no good reason at all the various indexes will come up with various ways of saying the same thing: Fringe benefits; Employee benefits; Employee fringe benefits; Employees’ benefit plans; Non-wage payments; Nonwage payments; and Staff welfare.
The Library of Congress Subject Cataloging manual is a tool devised for LC catalogers, and by extension anyone wanting to do cataloging according to LC standards, for maintaining uniformity. The only problem with the LC subject cataloging manual is that is covers only a tiny fraction of all the possible problems subject cataloging and run up against. Especially in indexing periodical literature, where new subjects and minute aspects of existing subjects require headings far beyond what LC has ever dealt with, we have found the need for many more and more detailed standards and guidelines for the formulation of subjects headings.
I'll give you just one example, but a big one. The internet. Imagine how many articles have been written about the internet in the past three years. Think of all the different topics related to the internet. Then think of all the different ways the various indexers and editors might come up with to describe those topics. Think of all the times two editors would be using the same word or phrase for two different things. Think of all the times material on the same topic is going to two or ten different places. Think of all the times material of two topics is going under one heading in one index and two separate headings in another. We have tried to get on top of this problem before it got completely out of control. What one index called Medicine -- Internet resources, the next might call: Online computer services -- Medical information; Medical databases; Information systems--Medicine; Internet -- Medical use, etc. Without going into details, I will tell you that we have divided all internet topics into four categories: First names of web sites, and then subjects: 1) information, for articles about the information available on the web, 2) transactions, for various kinds of transactions, such as banking, voting, etc., 3) advertising, for all the articles about things being advertised on the internet, and 4) Use, for articles on who is using the internet and how they are using it. For each of these categories we now have a formula for a phrase heading or a set of subdivisions to be applied under topics, classes of persons, etc.
The purpose of standards and guidelines is to facilitate uniformity in subject headings. The first kind of uniformity is that within a single catalog. This means not only that material on a single topic be found under a single uniform heading, but also that similar topics be given similar headings. If a user finds material on information about impressionist art that is available on the internet under the heading Impressionist art--Internet resources (this by the way, is parallel to our old subdivisions Information resources and Library resources), then they can logically find similar material on internet information on historic preservation under Historic Preservation -- Internet resources. At the Wilson Company we have between 900 and a thousand new subject headings a week, so it helps if the various indexes can create headings according to clear patterns. In the Sears List these patterns, as laid out in the front matter and the general references, are particularly important, because we are asking catalogers to create headings as needed for great numbers of things. Under animal we have only a few animals listed, then a general reference to create headings for other types of animals as needed. We have instructions within the List for nearly 1200 subdivisions with indications of what types of headings they may be used under and top mean what. For this reason we have tried to be as consistent as possible in the headings that are included in the List. Over the years, however, we have picked up many of the inconsistencies that are to be found in LCSH and elsewhere. Why, or example, should Social policy, Economic policy, Commercial policy, and Military policy be subdivisions under places, while Cultural policy, Information policy, Environmental policy; Energy policy; Telecommunication policy, and Manpower policy, are subdivided geographically, and policies regarding particular topics, such as the Homeless should be topic -- Government policy -- Place? In Sears we have decided to go ahead and have all phrase headings for policies and all topics subdivided by Government policy subdivided by place. This is only one example of the need for a consistent pattern to guarantee uniformity in cataloging.
One of the biggest steps in recent years towards greater uniformity in subject headings has been the Airlie House conference guideline on the order of subdivisions. There are exceptions to this rule, most notably in the field of art, but the rule now is that subdivisions will follow the order Topical -- Geographical -- Chronological -- Form. The purpose of this rule is to rein in the chaos created by free floating subdivision, which are equally valid according to machine validation no matter what order you use them in. In the LC bibliographic database, since they have not gone back to revise old records, you can find books cataloged under all of the following headings: Grain -- Transportation -- Rates -- United States; Grain -- Transportation -- United States -- Rates; and Grain -- United States -- Transportation -- Rates.
I said the first kind of uniformity is that within a single. So what is the second? That is uniformity in cooperative cataloging. The world of cooperative cataloging is like our little world at Wilson. Without uniformity, there can be no consistent merging and matching of records. Now I want to tell you a story about something I discovered. This is the sort of thing I can't tell my friends who are not librarians, because they don't find it all that exciting. And many of you will know about this already. I was checking a reference for a quotation I had taken from a secondary source and I wanted to cite the original, which was in Library Journal for the year 1877. The volume 1876-77 is the very first volume of Library Journal, and I was curious to see what was being written about then. Nearly the entire volume was devoted to the topic of cooperative cataloging. There are articles by Melvil Dewey and various other luminaries of librarianship and a voluminous correspondence on the topic. There are also several articles by William Frederick Poole, who was then the head of the Chicago Public Library, including his rules for indexing, because he was still trying to get cooperative indexing of periodicals off the ground. Then I realized two things. That cooperative cataloging is not new. What were our old printed cards but cooperative cataloging. Or at least centralized cataloging. We had to do all our local cataloging to merge and match with the cataloging that came from above. The second thing that came clear to me is that all the rules of modern cataloging, both those for descriptive cataloging and Cutter's Rules for the Dictionary Catalog came out of the need for uniformity in cooperative cataloging. Cutter's Rules, which are not arbitrary but are firmly grounded in logic, are the Constitution of modern cataloging. He formulated once and for all the rule of specific and direct entry. If you want to know how we have gone off the track and invited chaos into our catalogs by assigned categories of persons to individual biographies, to cite just one example, you need look no further than Cutter's rules.
This takes us up to about 1904, which is the year of the last edition of Cutter's Rules. Now I will turn the discussion over to Trudi, who will talk about the further history of guidelines for subject cataloging.