Day 11: Subject headings: Who is the authority?

March 26, 2009
7.5 hours

April is National Poetry Month!

Lisa celebrates this month in magnificent ways. This year she has invited two poets to come & speak, collaborated with the 8^th grade English teachers on a poetry unit and is holding the second annual school wide poetry jam.

To help prepare & get students & teacher excited, I created an annotated bibliography of poetry materials for teachers; the list contained materials available at both the school library & at the local library. The bibliography highlighted not only great books of poetry but teacher resources for incorporating poetry in lessons or units.

Today I created an annotated bibliography of poetry materials for students.

Digging through the online catalog to find materials I discovered two things:

1. The materials needed to be listed in two fashions: poetry collections & verse fiction. The separation would allow for a greater use of both lists as well as a quicker guide to what students were seeking. By listing verse fiction on a separate bibliography, some students will be exposed to a new style & may find a new like for poetry & verse.

2. Your catalog may not be your friend. Some of the verse fiction that Lisa & I knew was within the collection did not list poetry or verse in the subject headings or the summary. This created a big problem for us as we wanted to try to list the numerous great offerings the library media center had! Lisa sent me online. Starting with public libraries & library sources, like VOYA, YALSA, etc, I started looking for any listings of verse fiction. Then I had to search the catalog to determine if the book was within the collection. It was a time consuming process.

As I was working on the project I thought back to both my introduction to cataloging & my school library media center cataloging courses. In both we discussed creating a user friendly catalog. Will the Sears (or other selected subject authority) provide subject headings that the students will use? Is there a value to adding non subject authority headings if it makes the materials searchable by the end user?

85.5 of 100 hours completed