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CONTENTS:
Introduction What are Subject Headings? How to Find Subject Headings Using Subject Headings Printer friendly version BACK TO: Tutorials home page |
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CONTENTS:
Introduction What are Subject Headings? How to Find Subject Headings Using Subject Headings Printer friendly version BACK TO: Tutorials home page |
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What good does it do to find that, for example, the official LCSH for "Ergonomics" is "Human engineering"? Well, once you have found the Library of Congress Subject Heading that represents your topic, you can use it in various ways to do research. For instance, you can enter it in a subject search in keyword mode. This search will find every record in the Library catalog that has this phrase in its subject headings. (Notice that the phrase has been entered here using single quotation marks. This is the punctuation that should be used to search these words as a phrase in the Library catalog, i.e. only retrieving records that have these words together and in just this order.) The great thing about using a LCSH in this way is that every item on the list of items retrieved is about your topic, and most, if not all, of the items in the Library on your topic will be on this list. This is basically what the good researcher wants to do when searching in a database: find all the items that are relevant to his topic (so he doesn't miss anything good) and find only the items that are relevant to his topic (so he doesn't have to sift through a lot of irrelevant records). In short, using Library of Congress Subject Headings in this way is a very efficient way to carry out your research on a particular topic. |
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Comments | LSU Libraries | Louisiana State University | Library Instruction Baton Rouge, LA 70803 Tel (225) 578-5652 | Fax (225) 578-9432 Copyright © 1998-2008 LSU Libraries URL: http://www.lib.lsu.edu/instruction/subjectheadings/subjectheadings10.htm Last Updated: Friday, 26-Oct-2007 08:57:05 CDT |
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