Is there a cataloger in the house?! The fine folks over at radical reference are having a Library of Congress Subject Heading Suggestion Blog-a-Thon. Between now and Sunday, April 27, you can suggest subject headings and/or cross-references which will then be compiled and sent to the Library of Congress. Uber-cataloger Sandy Berman has been doing this for years, so it's great to see others taking on the challenge of collaborative subject description!

Some time between now and Sunday, April 27 at 6pm Eastern:

1. Select one or more subject headings or cross-references to suggest
2. Provide material to support your suggestion (in the form of a link and excerpted text/image)
3. Blog it somewhere (your own site; Radical Reference--if you're a registered and authenticated user on the site, you can create your own blog post, if not, just make it a comment to this post; an online file sharing service like Google Docs or Zoho)
4. Tag it for del.icio.us: rr_lcsh2008 and for:radical_reference. If you don't have a delicious account email me, and I'll tag it for you.
5. If you are suggesting a subject heading not previously submitted to LC (e.g. not on Sandy's scorecard), also submit your proposal to the Program for Cooperative Cataloging.
6. For discussion and help, join the Meebo and/or Skype chat,which will be active on Sunday from 4-6 ET for sure, and other times, as staffed.
7. If you are in the NYC area, you can come to the ABC No Rio Computer Center on Manhattan's Lower East Side for some in person collaboration.
8. We will email a link to the tagged items to LC, print out a copy of each blog post and mail it to Sandy, and we're kinda hoping that the members of the RADCAT (radical cataloging) discussion list will consider entering some of the suggested headings properly into the proposal form

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?!?!