Library of Congress Subject Headings
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) has been actively maintained
since 1898 to catalog materials held at the Library of Congress. By virtue of
cooperative cataloging other libraries around the United States also use LCSH to
provide subject access to their collections. In addition LCSH is used
internationally, often in translation. LCSH in this service includes all Library
of Congress Subject Headings, free-floating subdivisions (topical and form),
Genre/Form headings, Children's (AC) headings, and validation strings* for which
authority records have been created. The content includes a few name headings
(personal and corporate), such as William Shakespeare, Jesus Christ, and Harvard
University, and geographic headings that are added to LCSH as they are needed to
establish subdivisions, provide a pattern for subdivision practice, or provide
reference structure for other terms. This content is expanded beyond the print
issue of LCSH (the "red books") with inclusion of validation strings.
*Validation strings: Some authority records are for headings that have been
built by adding subdivisions. These records are the result of an ongoing project
to programmatically create authority records for valid subject strings from
subject heading strings found in bibliographic records. The authority records
for these subject strings were created so the entire string could be
machine-validated. The strings do not have broader, narrower, or related terms.
URI(s)
Scheme Members
Instance Of
Change Notes
Alternate Formats
