Library of Congress Subject Headings

LC Subject Headings are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize, and disseminate documents.

Subject heading is a human and intellectual endeavor, by which trained professionals apply topic descriptions to items in their collections.

As a result, the term 'Afro-American' to describe African-American topics in LCSH was used long after it lost currency and acceptance in the population.

In 2016 LCSH was subject to national news coverage when the Library of Congress decided to revise the heading 'Illegal aliens', an action opposed by congressional Republicans.

[5] The Subject Headings were formerly published in large red volumes (currently ten), which are typically displayed in the reference sections of research libraries.

[6] A web service was set up by Ed Summers, a Library of Congress employee, circa April 2008,[7] using SKOS to allow for simple browsing of the subject headings.

[11] Timothy Binga, director of libraries at the Center for Inquiry, notes issues that make it more difficult to use the standardized language of LCSH to find material.

The easiest way to find and use LCSH is to start with a 'keyword' search and then look at the Subject Headings of a relevant item to locate other related material.

[15] LCSH also fail to represent how Indigenous ways of learning focus heavily on spatial, social and cultural relationships.

"[18] The Xwi7xwa Library at the Vancouver branch of the University of British Columbia use First Nations House of Learning (FNHL) Subject Headings, a local variant of Brian Deer's system.