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/

Mental health and a problem with juvie fiction

Image via WikipediaFinishing up "Mental health" today.

One problem I've discovered is that when the Library of Congress subject headings are not deleted or changed in a record fiction books can display without the subdivision because "Juvenile fiction" in some library catalog software. For example, the book Border Crossing by Jessica Lee Anderson has two subject headings when it comes from Alliance +, Mental illness--Juvenile fiction (Library of Congress) and Mental illness--Fiction (Sears). The problem comes because our catalog software, Destiny, does not display the Juvenile fiction subheading so it looks like this is a non-fiction book about mental illness. The solution is to either change the LC subdivision to Fiction or delete it entirely. I choose to delete it--along with all the other irrelevant or duplicated LC subject headings. This makes it far less confusing for the patron when searching for non-fiction books about a topic in the catalog.