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Finding and Using LC Subject Headings in the ZSR Library Catalog

Transcript

Hello my name is Rosalyn. Today we are going to be talking about library of Congress subject headings in our online catalog. The easiest way to find library of congress subject headings and the way that makes them the most useful to you when you are looking for books on your subject, is to first do a search in our library catalog. To do that, in most instances, you will want to be on the Guided Keyword tab from our catalog's main page. Our catalog can be accessed by any library page by clicking on the catalog tab, or you can navigate to catalog.zsr.wfu.edu. In most instances, when conducting a search, you will want to be on the guided keyword tab, so that you can search for all of the books on a particular subject. For this example, we are going to look for books on democracy in South Africa. So, in my first search I will do south Africa and I will pull down 'as a phrase' in the drop down box to be sure that it searches for those together and then I will type democracy in my second search box. When I click search you will see that 92 titles come up in my results. So, the first thing to do is scan through my results and see if any of those books look interesting for your topic. In this example I will select Global economy and democracy in South Africa. Once you are on the record for a book in our catalog, if you scroll to the bottom of the record you should see an area entitled, Subjects. This is where the Library of Congress Subject Headings are listed. Sometimes there may be only one, sometimes there may be as many as 9 or 10. Some of them may be long and complicated; some of them may be simple. What you need to know, is that these are assigned by catalogers for every book that comes into the library and they indicate the subject matter of the book. So, if you see a library of Congress subject heading that is on your topic and you click on that subject heading, what you will find is how many books in the library we have, with that particular subject heading. In this example, we have 28. To see a list of those 28 you simply click on the link, to the left, under the number sign and you will be taken to a list of all 28 books that have a subject term of Democracy in South Africa. This will allow you to focus your search and to go from one book on your subject to many, many others. As always, if you ever have questions, you use the askzak link on any library page, you can email us at askzak@wfu.edu or using aim you can IM us at askzaklive. I hope this has been an assistance, thank you very much


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