Lundgren,Jimmie Harrell wrote:
> Please forgive if details are a somewhat sketchy here, but I wanted to offer just a little more information.
>
> Although in the past the specific subject strings other than in pattern headings usually did not have corresponding authority records, this is no longer the case.
>
> There was an LC project to create authority records for subheadings that is described at http://www.loc.gov/catdir/cpso/subdauth.html
>
There are 342,684 subject authority records. This is NOT the number of
individual subject headings that have been assigned to bibliographic
records, which number in the millions (just do a count on your subject
file, 650's and 651's). So the LC subject authority files is not a file
of subject headings that have been assigned. It is a file of patterns
you can use to assign subject headings. While the Airlie House
conference in 1991 proposed a set order of the subheadings and an
increase in the number of pre-coordinated headings, the actual number of
entries in LCSH shows that the file still contains only a fraction of
the pre-coordinated strings that have been created.
kc
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Received on Mon May 18 2009 - 13:09:48 EDT