Medical Subject Headings

Relationships abound in the library and information science (LIS) world. Those relationships may be social in nature, as, for instance, when we deal with human relationships among library personnel or relationships (i. e. , "public relations") between an information center and its clientele. The relationships may be educational, as, for example, when we examine the relationship between the curriculum of an accredited school and the needs of the work force it is preparing students to join. Or the relationships may be economic, as when we investigate the relationship between the cost of journals and the frequency with which they are cited. Many of the relationships of concern to us reflect phenomena entirely internal to the field: the relationship between manuscript collections, archives, and special collections; the relationship between end user search behavior and the effectiveness of searches; the relationship between access to and use of information resources; the relationship between recall and precision; the relationship between various bibliometric laws; etc. The list of such relationships could go on and on. The relationships addressed in this volume are restricted to those involved in the organization of recorded knowledge, which tend to have a conceptual or semantic basis, although statistical means are sometimes used in their discovery.

Presents suggested headings appropriate for use in the catalogs of small and medium-sized libraries, and provides patterns and instructions for adding new headings as they are required. The seventeenth edition features a revision of headings for the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, as well as many new subdivisions.

This detailed book is a “how-to” guide to building controlled vocabulary tools, cataloging and indexing cultural materials with terms and names from controlled vocabularies, and using vocabularies in search engines and databases to enhance discovery and retrieval online. Also covered are the following: What are controlled vocabularies and why are they useful? Which vocabularies exist for cataloging art and cultural objects? How should they be integrated in a cataloging system? How should they be used for indexing and for retrieval? How should an institution construct a local authority file? The links in a controlled vocabulary ensure that relationships are defined and maintained for both cataloging and retrieval, clarifying whether a rose window and a Catherine wheel are the same thing, or how pot-metal glass is related to the more general term stained glass. The book provides organizations and individuals with a practical tool for creating and implementing vocabularies as reference tools, sources of documentation, and powerful enhancements for online searching.