Is it Art and technology or Technology and art?

Image courtesy of the Rhode Island School of Design

So here's another little dilemma Sears provides. I'm working on the subject heading "Art" and the note states "SA (See also) ...art and other subjects, e.g. Art and mythology...." A title appears in the collection which has the heading "Art and technology." When I peruse the heading "Technology" there is a similar note saying, "SA technology and other subjects,..." My question then has to be: which is it? "Art and technology" or "Technology and art?" Since both are valid headings both must be considered. Since "Art" comes first alphabetically, I'll use that for now. More later when I've had a chance to look at Library of Congress Authorities (The whole LoC system is down right now for maintenance). In the meantime, what's the relationship between "Art and technology" and Art--Technological innovations?" Research to follow.
In following up I discovered that LoC does indeed use Art and technology with a cross-reference from Technology and art. And it doesn't give the same direction about "Art and ... [other topic]" ot "Technology and ... [other topic]" which Sears gives.

Beyond "Architecture"

I'm up to "Armed forces" in the subject heading list now but had to pass through "Architecture" to get there. Fortunately, there is no discrepancy with LC on the basic heading but many with indirect headings did need to be changed. Several years ago (I'm not sure which edition it was) Sears changed from indirect heading such as "Architecture, Greek" to direct, "Greek architecture. With few exceptions, mostly geographic, such as "Tahoe, Lake" and "Everest, Mount (China and Nepal)," Sears uses direct phrasing rather than indirect. Whether this is an improvement or not is debatable, but the conscientious cataloger using Sears will eliminate headings which are indirect in favor of those which are direct.
Another issue which Sears is very clear about is the admission that the Sears List cannot account for every possible heading. "The general references in the List should reinforce the point that the List does not aim at completeness and must be expanded. Even where there is no general reference, narrower terms for types of things and examples and instances of things must be added as needed." (Page xxxv) This gets us back to "Armed forces." Based on the previous quote, I added "Special forces (Military science)" to the List for a title The visual dictionary of special military forces. How did I decide upon the exact wording of the heading? I used the Library of Congress Authorities, a resource which every cataloger should be intimately familiar with.

http://www.reddit.com/r/MilitaryPorn/comments/2vjbak/mexican_special_forces_participate_in_a_military/

Archeology vs. archaeology

For some reason Sears editors prefer to use the spelling a-r-c-h-e-o-l-o-g-y instead of the spelling used by the Library of Congress, archaeology. I'm not sure why this is the case. I noticed that as I'm entering the term into a record my computer actually sees it as a misspelling. I think the editors thinks it's kind of pretentious to put that "a" in the middle of the word but if the entire world recognizes the word with the "a" then what's the issue?

A new catalog, a new beginning

As you can see I haven't posted to this blog in quite a while. Now I have a new motivation to do so. For the past several months I've been working on the Oakland Unified School District online catalog. My major task is fixing subject headings, but in the process I'm also merging duplicate records, finding or creating better records, deleting records with no copies, and so forth. I started at the beginning of the alphabet (actually, numerals first) and am already up to archeology. Woo-hoo! My main motivation for continuing this blog will be concerns and criticism of Sears List of Subject Headings. I'm finding typos all over the latest edition (21st : 2014) and will point those out as I go along but there also other issues which crop up including incomplete cross-references, interesting lapses in included subject headings, and many more. I encourage comments on my posts. I have my opinions which you certainly may not agree with. Let's get a conversation going!