AALL Annual Meeting, New Orleans, July 2007
Technical Services Special Interest Section
Cataloging & Classification Standing Committee
Inherently Legal Subject Headings Project
Progress Report
Yael Mandelstam
Fordham Law School Library
ymandelstam [at] law.fordham.edu
The Inherently Legal Subject Heading (ILSH) task force completed the analysis of the compiled legal headings and has been submitting proposals to the Library of Congress via SACO for adding [topic]–Law and legislation "see" references (MARC 21 field 450) to existing authority records. The headings that were already submitted to SACO have been marked with an asterisk (*) on the ILSH web site at http://www.lawlib.duq.edu/ILSH/index.htm.
As I reported last year, we formed an interesting partnership with the FAST team. FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)–developed by OCLC in cooperation with the Library of Congress--is a simplified subject vocabulary derived from LCSH. For more information on the FAST project, go to http://www.oclc.org/research/projects/fast/
The FAST authority records have information that we at the ILSH project found extremely useful. Every FAST authority record includes the number of occurrences of each heading in the LC catalog and in WorldCat. Since FAST established authority records not only for topical headings established by the Library of Congress, but also for topical subject strings that appear in WorldCat, we found in FAST a great analysis tool for identifying misuses of "Law and legislation" subdivision. When L&L has been consistently misapplied as a subdivision to a legal subject heading, we could safely conclude that the legal status of that heading was not clear to many catalogers.
In September 2006, Ed O'Neill, the FAST team leader, sent us an Excel file with 1405 FAST topical headings that included Law and legislation but did not have a corresponding LC authority record. Here are two typical entries from this file:
| FAST ARN | FAST 150 Heading | LC Usage | WorldCat Usage |
Root LC Heading |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| fst00793849 | AIDS (Disease) $x Law and legislation |
190 | 919 | AIDS (Disease) $0(DLC)sh 85002541 |
| fst00862656 | Civil rights $x Law and legislation |
8 | 296 | Civil rights $0(DLC)sh 85026371 |
As you can see, both headings have not been established by LC, yet one of them is correct and the other is not. AIDS (Disease) falls under the pattern heading for diseases and therefore can be used with L&L, while Civil rights is a legal subject heading that should not be used with L&L. Other entries in the file included non-legal headings that were assigned L&L even though they have not been established by LC, nor did they fall under any of the pattern headings (e.g. Dwellings); and headings falling under classes of persons (e.g. Prisoners) and ethnic groups (e.g. Indians of North America) that were assigned Law and legislation instead of Legal status, laws, etc.
The data, therefore, needed careful analysis, but was nonetheless very helpful in determining the level of confusion regarding specific legal subject headings.
In the spirit of cooperation, we offered to help the FAST team clean up all the incorrect L&L headings in their authority file, and we already have several hundred headings marked for deletion. At the recent Subject Analysis Committee meeting at ALA Annual, Ed O'Neill urged other subject specialty groups to follow the model of the FAST/ILSH cooperation; other groups could take advantage of the easy-to-manipulate data from WorldCat, and FAST could benefit from the involvement of subject specialists who can help fine-tune the FAST authority file.
By now, the ILSH task force has submitted to LC all the relevant headings extracted from the FAST file, but the task force is continuing to submit L&L proposals to LC even for headings that are quite obviously legal. We believe that the addition of L&L cross references will facilitate not only more effective automatic validation of the heading, but also the easy extraction of a subset of legal headings from the LC database for future subject headings streamlining and simplification projects.