LC Subject Heading Remapping: Making Good on Good Intentions
Library of Congress subject headings don’t always reflect the values of the institutions using them, and they change at the speed of Congress. Over the years there has been a desire for institutions to choose for themselves what words to use for LC terms, and there have been a variety of ways to do this.
The University of Michigan used the method of creating local authority records to replace the terms. This worked well for our records, but because we include records that aren’t ours–from the Alma community zone and from HathiTrust–these changes weren’t applied to all of the records in our catalog. This meant that for users using our discovery system, instead of only seeing our preferred terms, they had a mix of our preferred term AND the current LC term. On top of this, University of Michigan has an LC Subject Browse application, and all of our preferred terms weren’t included–because they aren’t technically LC terms anymore–effectively downgrading their usefulness.
With inspiration from a presentation by Triangle Research Libraries Network for the ALA in 2021, we came up with a plan to thoroughly fix this problem. Right before the Fall 2024 term, the solution went into use. We went into the project thinking it would be a simple “replace this phrase with that phrase” problem, and it turned out to be quite a bit more complicated than that.
This presentation will discuss why this is a hard problem, how we fixed the problem, and what institutional structures enabled us to actually get this work done.