Most commentators agree that subject access in the humanities is very difficult because the vocabulary or natural language of the humanities is imprecise and often used uniquely by different humanists. This article tests that view by studying the entry terms in leading encyclopedias and dictionaries in the humanities. The article presumes that such entry terms constitute the most important components of the humanists' vocabulary. It proposes categories that distinguish entry terms by their precision and, therefore, their potential for effectiveness in subject access. A sample of entry terms is then classified into the categories proposed. This analysis indicates two things. On the one hand, it partially confirms the usual view that subject access in the humanities is difficult by showing that part of the humanist's vocabulary is imprecise. On the other hand, because a majority of the terms in the sample are precise, namely, singular proper terms--the names of persons or single creative works--subject acce...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/4307661

Subject Access in the Humanities and the Precision of the Humanist's Vocabulary.

In June 2009, the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services Heads of Technical Services in Large Research Libraries Interest Group established the Task Force on Cost/Value Assessment of Bibliographic Control to address recommendation 5.1.1.1 of On the Record: Report of the Library of Congress Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control, which focused on developing measures for costs, benefits, and value of bibliographic control. This paper outlines results of that task force's efforts to develop and articulate metrics for evaluating the cost and value of cataloging activities specifically, and offers some next steps that the community could take to further the profession's collective understanding of the costs and values associated with bibliographic control.

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Assessing the Cost and Value of Bibliographic Control

This is the first of a series of articles that explore the concept of work and attempt to construct a definition of the term based on Anglo-American cataloging theory and practice. The user and the objects of the catalog are studied first.

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What is a Work? Part 1, The User and the Objects of the Catalog.

Over the past few years there has been a significant amount of work in the area of cataloging internet resources, primarily using new metadata standards like the Dublin Core, but there has been little work on applying new data description formats like SGML and XML to traditional cataloging practices. What little work has been done in the area of using SGML and XML for traditional bibliographic description has primarily been based on the concept of converting MARC tagging into XML tagging. I suggest that, rather than attempting to convert existing MARC tagging into a new syntax based on SGML or XML, a more fruitful possibility is to return to the cataloging standards and describe their inherent structure, learning from how MARC has been used successfully in modern OPACs while attempting to avoid MARC's rigid field-based restrictions.

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Applying XML to the Bibliographic Description

The need to uniquely identify people with the same name will be as important in a linked data environment as it is in traditional library catalogs. Although older cataloging rules allowed multiple identities to share space in an authority record, the current rules are more stringent, requiring that all authorized access points for people to be disambiguated. While this task has been made much easier in recent years because of the amount of biographical material on the web, deceased and obscure people can pose a complex challenge. This is especially true for special collections materials, which are being given greater attention but which often deal with people who are long dead and little known. This paper builds on previous research in the use of online resources to perform authority work by providing an in-depth analysis of the genealogist’s toolkit and examining how freely available online genealogical sources can be used to find the types of distinctive information needed to create unique access points for people.

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Ake I. Koel

Papers

Bibliographic Control at the Crossroads: Do We Get Our Money's Worth?.