AALL Annual Meeting, Portland, Oregon, July 2008
Technical Services Special Interest Section
Cataloging & Classification Standing Committee
Report on the Inherently Legal Subject Headings Project
and the FAST Cleanup Project
Submitted by Yael Mandelstam
Fordham Law School Library
ymandelstam [at] law.fordham.edu
Inherently Legal Subject Headings Project
The Inherently Legal Subject Headings Task Force (ILSHTF) continues to send proposals to the Library of Congress via SACO for adding [Topic]–Law and legislation see references to authority records of legal subject headings. The references are added to help clarify the legal status of these headings and reduce at least some of the misuses of "Law and legislation" in our shared bibliographic databases. The task force is currently communicating with the Library of Congress Cataloging Policy and Support Office (CPSO) about the possibility of creating a list of obviously legal headings that will not be eligible for the "Law and legislation" references.
FAST Cleanup Project
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology)--a subject vocabulary derived from LCSH-- was developed by OCLC in cooperation with the Library of Congress. The ILSH task force was fortunate to receive from Ed O'Neill (OCLC) a file of 1405 FAST topical headings that had "Law and legislation" subdivisions but no corresponding LC authority record. The file helped the task force determine the extent to which this subdivision is being applied incorrectly on WorldCat.
In return, AALL catalogers offered to help clean up the FAST file from incorrect "Law and legislation" subdivisions. A group of 27 volunteers analyzed and marked the FAST headings, and in October 2007, the file was sent to Ed. From the 1405 headings examined, 946 (67%) were marked for deletion because of unauthorized application of "Law and legislation"; 78 (6%) were for classes of persons or ethnic group that require "Legal status, laws, etc." subdivision rather than "Law and legislation"; and 381 (27%) were marked as correct.
While working on the FAST file, the group came across discrepancies between some notes in authority records for subdivisions controlled by pattern headings and instructions for individual pattern headings in the Subject Cataloging Manual: Subject Headings (SCM:SH). Example:
H1149: TYPES OF HEADINGS COVERED BY THE PATTERN: Headings for individual chemicals and groups of chemicals.
Scope note in sh 99004848 (–Law and legislation): Use as a topical subdivision under ... , individual chemicals, ...
We communicated this issue to Lynn El Hoshy from CPSO who discussed it with her colleagues. They agreed that although there were 1000+ subject authority records to revise, it would be worthwhile to bring the wording in the records in line with the SCM:SH. A month later we were delighted to hear from Lynn that the project was done!