Ted Gemberling wrote:
>Now, when I first started out as a cataloger, I remember being told that
>you shouldn't put a heading on unless at least a third of the book is
>about that topic.
LC uses the 20% rule for their heading assigments. Other thesauri
may have their own preferences. And there's in-house practice too,
as you mention later in your paragraph.
>Another cataloging rule that I've sometimes violated is one that says
>you shouldn't put more than 3 subjects on a bib. Actually, I don't think
>this is strictly a rule today, but I think it may have been at one
>point. Another aspect of it was that if you had more than 3, you were
>supposed to find a more general one that covered them or some of them,
>to bring them to three or fewer.
Reminds me of LC's "Rule of 3": "If a general topic includes in its
scope more than three subtopics, but the work being cataloged
discusses only two or three of these subtopics, assign the
appropriate two or three headings rather than the broader
heading.... If more than three of the subtopics are discussed in the
work, assign the broad heading instead...."
>I'm not saying there shouldn't be practical limits on the number of
>subject headings we use. But I just don't think I can live with the
>3-subject rule all the time.
LC advises anywhere from one to six headings for a work, but no more
than ten in exceptional circumstances. Looks like they stand by
their general rule to "assign to the work being cataloged one or more
subject headings that best summarize the overall contents of the work
and provide access to its most important topics," though I tend to
bend a bit toward the granularity of indexing (cf. summarizing) by
including contents notes whenever possible, the occasional quoted
summary/abstract, and once in a while a heading or two on a topic
that I feel is important within the work, but makes up less than 20%
of the whole.
--
Mark K. Ehlert University of Minnesota Libraries
Library Assistant 2 160 Wilson Library
Technical Services 309 19th Ave. S.
Phone: 612-625-4840 Minneapolis, MN 55455
E-mail: ehler043_at_umn.edu
Received on Mon Aug 06 2007 - 09:27:44 EDT