The recently released LC dataset of some 342,684 subject headings was
now merged into our browser:
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/lcsh/
Some 70.000 new terms have been added this way, making it a total of
6.6 million records. These include names, being far more numerous than
topics.
Improvements have been made in the handling of broader terms. Clicking
on one brings up the display of the alphabetical listing under
that term so you see what else there is in the vicinity.
In my opinion, LC's own approach so far is lacking alphabetical
browsing:
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/
So, for a search you may easily get a message like
Your search for "dorian grey" retrieved 0 results.
where it would be of some help to display, instead, an alphabetically
arranged listing that would show you what there is and what there isn't
so you may detect your error:
http://www.biblio.tu-bs.de/db/lcsh/page.php?urG=LCS&urS=dorian+grey
(Dorian Gray, as a ficitious character, is a topical heading, not a
personal name one!)
(For this case, Google asks no "Did you mean" question, although
bringing up a mixture of both spellings, but very different hit counts.)
Incidentally, I noticed that there's no entry for the "Goldberg
Variations" in LCSH. That's because it has a Uniform title record
under "Bach, Johann Sebastian, 1685-1750. Goldberg-Variationen".
These records are not in id.loc.gov either, nor in our browser,
but as of yet only in
http://authorities.loc.gov
These details show that the topical headings alone do not by far include
everything anyone would intuitively expect when doing subject searches.
Rather, every authority record, whatever type, can be used as a subject
access point.
B.Eversberg
Received on Fri May 08 2009 - 03:52:39 EDT