Subejct Heading : Types of Subject Headings and Importance
by Muhammad Yousuf Ali
Subject Headings are helping tools to retrieve the information from library or online public access catalogue. This small piece of writing discuss about the three point about the Subject Headings.
Q No. 1 What is Subject Heading?
Q No. 2 What are the three main types of subject heading?
Q No. 3 What are the Importance of subject heading?
Q No. 1 What is Subject Heading?
A subject heading is a specific word or phrase used to find and organize books and articles by topic. Subject headings can be a great way to easily find things related directly to your topic. Once you have identified a book or article that is worthwhile, look at the subject headings. In the online catalog these are found in the “catalog record” and you can click directly on the subject heading to get a list of books on the same subject.
Subject headings can often be found on the page of a book that provides the publisher’s information, or at or near the bottom of the page of an online record of a book or article.
A subject heading may be subdivided by the addition of form subdivisions, geographical subdivisions, chronological subdivisions, and topical subdivisions to add greater specificity or add a parenthetical qualifier to add semantic clarification.
Q No. 2 What are the three main types of subject heading?
There are three types of Subject Heading
1. Sears List of Subject
Sears list of subject head support the Dewey decimal classification scheme. The Sears List of Subject Headings is a general-use controlled vocabulary for describing library collections, geared towards smaller public and school libraries. It includes topical, form, and geographic headings as well as proper names.
2. Library of Congress Subject Heading
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is the list of headings produced from the subject authority file maintained by the United States Library of Congress for use in bibliographic records. It is popularly known by its abbreviation as LCSH and is sometimes used interchangeably with the phrase subject authority file.
3. Medical Subject Heading (MeSH)
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) is a comprehensive controlled vocabulary for the purpose of indexing journal articles and books in the life sciences. It serves as a thesaurus that facilitates searching. Created and updated by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), it is used by the MEDLINE/PubMed article database.
Q No. 3 What are the Importance of subject heading?
Provide Access point to users
Subject Heading Provide Access point to information users through subject heading information seeker reach existing location of information books or article.
Quick Access to the Information
Subject heading also provide quick access to the information and relevant material. It also save the time of the information users.
More Reading Options
Subject heading provide more reading option to researchers and scholars to find more information about their research topic and provide them alternative terms and keywords to search their respective topic.
How to Cite this article
M.Y Ali (2023). Subjet headings : Types and importance. https://profileusuf.wordpress.com/subject-heading/
Research Knowledge and Information 