LCSH heading change from "govt publications" to "govt "information"
Submitted by jrjacobs on Wed, 2008-03-05 13:40.
My pal, Jenna Freedman, the Lower East Side Librarian started subscribing to the Library of Congress Subject Heading Weekly list (probably out of love for Libraries' great good friend and cataloger extraordinaire Sandy Berman!). This week she came across a strange one that I hope our readers can expound on in the comments, especially since I'm not a cataloger.
150 Electronic government information [May Subd Geog]
* 450 UF Electronic government publications [EARLIER FORM OF HEADING]
* 550 BT Government publications
Is this LC's documentation of a move away from government publications as the instantiation of our government's work toward e-government and government information as transaction? Should we be worried about this change in the heading? Is this just semantics? Is there a cataloger in the house?
The other one that I found strange was:
(C) 150 Global cooling [Not Subd Geog]
450 UF Cooling, Global
550 BT Global temperature changes
Is that some sort of Newspeak?!?!
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I'm not sure how I feel
I'm not sure how I feel about this cataloging change. A part of me thinks they just want to cover all formats of government publications, including electronic...and maybe they thought "publications" would make too many people associate the term with books rather than other formats such as microfiche, CD-ROMs, websites, .pdf files, etc. But the other part of me thinks the term "government information" doesn't make people associate it with depository libraries, the issuing agency, or GPO...and that annoys me. Is it wrong of me to feel that way?
"electronic" not needed
Good point. It shows how arcane LC's heading building and processes really are. The part that gets me is the term "electronic." Seems like that's a superfluous part of the heading that a) users won't think to search under; b) sets up a false dichotomy of electronic vs physical; and c) is dealt with in other areas of the MARC record (i.e., the 580 field would tell if there's a link and therefore is "electronic").
Global Cooling Not Newspeak
Global Cooling is a legitimate subject heading, at least for older works because back in the 1960s and 1970s, some mainstream climate experts wrote books supporting their conclusions that the earth was on the cusp of a new ice age.
I can't imagine that many new books will be devoted to the subject though. Folks in the 1960s and 1970s lacked much of the data we have now and all of their climate modeling capabilities would probably fit comfortably on my desktop computer. These days even the US Navy is taking global warming seriously enough to plan for an ice-free Arctic Ocean!
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"And besides all that, what we need is a decentralized, distributed system of depositing electronic files to local libraries willing to host them." -- Daniel Cornwall, tipping his hat to Cato the Elder for the original quote.
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