[LM_NET] HIT: Subject headings help needed

[Nancy Westendorf <nwestendorf@YAHOO.COM>]

Below are the responses for my question as to which subject headings we should use. 
Here is my original question: 
Hello,

We are using Destiny for our OPAC. Each of us orders independently from the other, 
and all titles merge into the union catalog for the district. We order from a 
variety of different vendors, we order our books with MARC records and processing. 
We are Prek-12th grade and include a few private schools as well that are in our 
School Library System.

My district is trying desperately to clean up our central catalog, and we are in a 
discussion about which version of subject headings we should use as our standard  
Sears or LC for children.=A0 I volunteered to=A0find out =what "the great brain" 
advises.  Any guidance you can provide will be greatly appreciated.
 
And here are the responses. Thanks to all!
 

We use LC for children and have been doing this for 35 years.
 
 
Having experience with both, I highly recommend Sears - it's far more 
"kid-friendly" than LC  (think pigs vs swine!)
-----------------------------------------------------------


 
My vote is Sears for K-12. 
LC for college.



 
My vote would be for Sears. I have noticed that some records come with both Sears 
and LC subject headings. Back in the old days when we had to type cards it made a 
difference. Today, though, I don't see why you can't use both.. Using both just 
creates more access points, and that's the name of the game.


Nancy
I'd be interested to hear if you get agreement from the electronic community at 
large on which to use.  We went through this a long time back and decided on using 
LC headings.  But, I think either would work.  It may depend more on how large and 
varied your union collection is.  LC tends to have more specific headings.  Sears 
tends to have more recent expressions incorporated into its headings.

I used to use Sears primarily, but now that the LOC subject headings
are on line, I have been switching over to that.   look at
http://authorities.loc.gov   what I find really useful there is the
names authority list.  For example.. how do you list Shirley Temple?
Jimmy Carter?
 
 
We use SEARS and our jobbers (different for each of us) always send the MARC with 
SEARS.  We're happier with that than we would be with LC for children.
 
I would use LOC, not lc for children or sears
 
Can you get copies of the profiles vendors use for your cataloging? What they used 
in past years?
that should help 
 
 
Hi Nancy,
I work in a high school and I've always used Sears.
 
We are in similar circumstances with Destiny, only we have 305 schools adding 
records.  From our vendors, we request BOTH Sears and LC Childrens.  But when we 
are doing original cataloging, we use Sears because of cost.  

BTW, it became so obvious when we all merged into Destiny that not every librarian 
should be allowed to catalog (horrendous records!), that we cut everyone off, but 
still allow them to pull records from Alliance+.  We have a self-assessment quiz 
that any librarian can take if they wish to determine if they will be allowed to do 
original cataloging.  Out of our 300 librarians, only about 75 have taken the 
quiz--5 failed.  Most of the others don't want to catalog and are happy using 
records already available or asking a crew of 10 volunteer catalogers to do the 
oddball stuff.
--
****************


Hi Nancy,
We use Sears, always have, and so continue to do so.
I'd be interested in reading whether there is an argument to use LC for Children 
rather than Sears, or vice versa: I did buy a copy of LC for Children once years 
ago, and found it quite user-friendly compared to Sears, but that was just an 
impression.
Good luck with this project!

Good luck!
One of Destiny's quirks is that it ignores the LC subheadings "Juvenile Fiction" 
and "Juvenile Literature."  It doesn't delete them, just ignores them.  This means 
a book with the LC subject heading "Cats--Juvenile Fiction" will show up in a 
"Cats" search as if it were a nonfiction title.  This may or may not annoy you and 
your other librarians.  [I find it several steps past annoying, but some people 
don't mind at all.]  
We found this out entirely by accident, after our merger - our trainer didn't 
mention it at all.
There is an online help sheet about it.
 
That said - our division decided to stick with Sears.
 
You might want to look at this document from the Texas State Library. It was 
developed when Texas was beginning to develop a state-wide catalog made up of the 
exported records from many schools/districts across the state
http://www.tsl.state.tx.us/ld/pubs/autostand/index.html especially the part about 
subject headings.


Nancy Westendorf, Librarian
Chester Dewey School 14
Rochester, NY
nwestendorf@yahoo.com 
 
 
 

 


      

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