In 2006, the Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access (ABA) at the Library of Congress (LC) requested the Cataloging Policy and Support Office to review of the pros and cons of pre- versus post-coordination of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). The final report (2/19/08) recommended, and the ABA Management accepted, that LC catalogers continue to apply pre-coordination of LCSH terms.

...

The LC report documents the recommendations approved in June 2007, regarding further automation of the assignment of subject heading strings, the expansion of machine validation of strings, further simplification of practices including the fixed order of subdivisions, exploration into LC's use of the current generation of sophisticated search engines, the enabling of more social tagging additions to the LC records, and encouragement of Web applications that take advantage of LCSH. On this latter point, LC intends to make LCSH freely available on the Web in a SKOS (Simple Knowledge Organization Schema) format for the world at large.

 

 

"Facet-based interfaces demonstrate some limitations of Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which were designed to deal with constraints that do not exist in the current computerized environment. This paper discusses some challenges for using LCSH for faceted browsing and navigation in library catalogs. Ideas are provided for improving results through system design, changes to LCSH practice, and LCSH structure."

ABSTRACT: Moving to a fully faceted syntax would resolve three problems facing Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): 1. Inconsistent syntax rules; 2. Inability to create headings that are coextensive with the topic of a work; and 3. Lack of effective displays for long lists of subdivisions under a single subject heading in OPACs and similar electronic displays. The authors advocate a fully faceted syntax using the facets of a modern faceted library classification (The Bliss Bibliographic Classification, 2d ed.). They demonstrate how this might be accomplished so as to integrate the new syntax with existing headings.

A project that John Mark Ockerbloom is currently working on--subject maps.

"This project is building new tools for browsing and discovering library resources, using conceptual maps based on Library of Congress subject headings. The aim is to provide more effective subject-based discovery that takes maximum advantage of the investments libraries have made in subject cataloging."

John has built the maps based on the explicit links in LCSH (i.e. references) and implicit relationships (e.g. terms related alphabetically)

Includes links to applications (live and demo) and a (very readable) white page describing the project.

An interesting interview with Barbara Tillett describes the process by which LSCH is changed, and responds to some of Sanford Berman's criticisms of LCSH.