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Subject Headings

What are Subject Headings? (1)


Titles are often poor indicators of the content of the books to which they belong.

For example, what is the topic of the book titled, Have a seat, please? Barbers? Furniture? (It’s actually about capital punishment.) What is the topic of the book titled, The view from nowhere? (It’s actually a philosophical work about objectivity.)

The lack of a straightforward connection between a work’s title and it’s content presents a problem for researchers, namely, how can a researcher do a topic search for materials in the library catalog when the search terms he uses might not match anything in the titles of some works on his topic? For instance, no matter what words I might use to reasonably describe the topic “capital punishment,” it’s unlikely that any of these will match the title, “Have a seat, please.” So how can I have a chance of retrieving works like this whose titles bear little relationship to their topics?



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