Learn Library of Congress Subject Access

Citation

Glasgow, E. (2003), "Learn Library of Congress Subject Access", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 1, pp. 44-45. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310457040

This useful and informative little book, of 107 pages, is the fourth of the “Library Basics Series”, the previous volumes having been devoted to such essential subjects as Classification, the Dewey Decimal System, and Descriptive Cataloguing. Jacki Ganendran is an experienced teacher of library science, a specialist in the usage and the availability of the American Library of Congress programmes, who currently teaches that subject at the Canberra Institute of Technology in Australia. Thus, she is well equipped to supply an essentially practical book, enlightening and instructive for students, and she has evidently relied heavily upon the invaluable feedback of her own students.

The book has been carefully written, in the form of definition, questions, and answers. Its essential appeal, therefore, must be for students, in training for the profession of librarians. Its methodology is logical, comprehensive, and scientific. It begins with a clear definition of subject classification. The next chapter embraces the system adopted by the American Library of Congress, beginning as long ago as 1898, and based upon the recommendations of the American Library Association a few years earlier. Thoroughly revised in 1975, this has become an extremely large list, sufficiently all‐embracing to include most categories and subdivisions.

Clearly, therefore, its mastery has become a challenging and very desirable qualification for potential librarians, at any rate in the bigger libraries world‐wide, and in the following chapters of this book details are set out, meticulously and well. The volume considers in depth the later stages of assigning subject headings, sub‐divisions, pattern headings, names, cumulative files, and practical examples. Significantly, answers to the various questions are printed towards the end of the book. There is a glossary of five pages, and an up‐to‐date bibliography of seven titles. The index is short but adequate.

Here we have, therefore, an entirely practical and instructive guide to its important subject, which is doubtless destined to have ahead of it a good future of useful service, alike for current librarians and for intending students of the profession. It may also be interesting to record the global prestige and acceptance of the Library of Congress Subject Access System, giving a measure of uniformity and collaboration transcending even the differences world‐wide of politics and language.