Cataloging Futures

Future of Library of Congress Subject Headings

I guess the days of the "red books" are over. Want to see what the future of LCSH might look like? Take a look at lcsh.info:

This is an experimental service that makes the Library of Congress Subject Headings available as linked-data using the SKOS vocabulary. The goal of lcsh.info is to encourage experimentation and use of LCSH on the web with the hopes of informing a similar effort at the Library of Congress to make a continually updated version available. More information about the Linked Data effort can be found on the W3C Wiki. [emphasis mine]

Nathan, thanks for reminding me about this a month ago :) Talk about slow blogging!

Reading Thomas Mann's response

In his response to the LC Working Group report, Thomas Mann insists that the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are still a useful, essential tool in the serious scholar's arsenal of information-seeking resources. I don't agree with Mann on every point. And I'm a lot more sanguine about LCSH as a discovery tool on the Web. But, we're in basic agreement that the LC subject headings can and will provide valuable subject-rich metadata in the future.

If the Library of Congress doesn't want to continue LCSH management, development, and maintenance (this is still not clear), they should open up this work to the library community. Just morph the subject authority records into XML (or some other Web-friendly format) and mount them on the Web as an open-source tool.

I think it's interest that there's no clamour to stop using other controlled vocabularies, like the Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). So, is this a debate/conversation about the value of subject-rich metadata or about where the Library of Congress wants to allocate taxpayers' dollars, as Mann suggests?