[Sigcr-l] Questions for the year of cataloging research: #1 Does an LCSH subdivided heading have a meaning

[Leonard Will]

On 2010-03-06 17:27, Simon Spero wrote:
> Here are some research questions that I think may be important
>
> *Subject Headings (LCSH and others)*
>
> Does a subdivided subject heading have a*meaning*? The results  in
> Drabenstott (1998) appear to show that that roughly 50% of their chosen
> subject headings could not be correctly paraphrased, even by technical
> services librarians, let alone adult or children patrons.  The study has
> methodological flaws, as discussed in the report itself.  The scoring
> mechanism and sample selection may have introduced some bias factors.  The
> paraphrase task may not have been an accurate measure of comprehension by
> patrons, or composition by cataloguers.  Because pre-coordinated subject
> heading strings are sequences of noun phrases, psycholingustic studies such
> as Gleitman and Gleitman (1971) may be suggestive.
> Unless speaker and hearer have the same understandings of the phrase
> strings, then subdividing headings as currently practiced may be futile.
>
On reading this it occurs to me that another aspect has not been considered:

As well as expressing a compound subject, an important role of 
pre-coordinated subject identifiers, whether as alphabetical subject 
headings or categories of a classification scheme, is to present a 
listing of resources in a useful order for browsing and navigation. 
Someone entering a subject catalogue should find related material 
together, organised in a logical and helpful order, so that they can 
gain an overview of the subject field and broaden or narrow their search 
as appropriate.

Thus subject headings should not be viewed and interpreted in isolation, 
but in the context of adjacent headings. This makes it easier to see 
what citation order of facets has been adopted and to interpret them 
accordingly.

I know that classified catalogues have never been popular in the USA as 
an information retrieval tool, but I think that they have an important 
role to play in providing a map of a subject area. Pre-coordinated 
subject headings go some way in this direction. Classification schemes 
are being re-discovered in web applications under the guise of "taxonomies".

Leonard Will

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