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The article discusses the presentations delivered by the CORE Faceted Subject Access Interest Group (FSAIG) during the ALA CORE Virtual Interest Group Week on March 5, 2024. Topics discussed include digital collections through the adoption of faceted subject vocabularies and the implementation of Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT). Attendees include Rebecca Saunders, Librarian at Western Carolina University and Kelley McGrath, Librarian at the University of Oregon.

Medium of performance is a common way of finding musical works, and the recently developed Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus for Music (LCMPT) improves access to medium of performance in bibliographic records compared to legacy standards. This article describes use of the "Music Form Genre" tool developed by Gary Strawn to add LCMPT terms, genre/form terms, and other updates to batches of bibliographic records for music scores for chamber music (Western art music composed for small ensembles). Additionally, URIs for name headings were added to the records in anticipation of future linked data developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research-in-practice paper examines how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are catalogued within Australian libraries. This paper will outline why Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges are not folktales and will argue against the use of the Library of Congress Subject Heading Folklore. This paper will explore the ways in which the University of Queensland Library have developed a culturally nuanced and holistic approach to cataloguing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges that engages Indigenous ways of organising, accessing and using information. This paper highlights the need for more Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cataloguers and urges libraries to examine their own practices to build more accurate representations of the communities they serve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, academic libraries have adjusted their approaches to codify their digital collections metadata standards. At the core of these efforts were conscious editing and reparative metadata initiatives that embraced, at varying levels based on the institution, ethical standards that provided inclusive terminology, addressed historic racist and sexist terms by placing them in context with contemporary language, and improved accessibility by using subject-specific thesauri outside the Library of Congress' controlled vocabularies. Dozens of academic, special, and public libraries have published guides to focused on these issues over the past four years. The approach can be time consuming or feel overwhelming as institutions attempt to boil down what the process of conducting conscious editing or reparative metadata work entails, who is qualified to do the work, and how to evaluate the impacts of such work. At the University of South Florida Libraries, our efforts to improve our overall metadata standards incorporated conscious editing as a guiding framework that, over the course of four years, evolved into a multi-departmental effort aimed at the strategic goal of increasing the accessibility of our collections in the broadest definition of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper comparatively investigates the relation between controlled vocabularies assigned by the experts in Library of Congress and tags assigned by users in Library Thing database in three subjects, Economics, History and Sociology under Social Science domain. Based on Term matching (S= 14.80 %, E= 12.77 % and H= 8.06 %) and Jaccard similarity coefficient (E= 0.15, S= 0.15 and H= 0.11), we found little matching between both vocabularies. We also found that experts mostly use double-word and multi-word specific topical terms (S= 73.14 %, E= 72.89 % and H= 61.05 %), whereas social taggers mostly use single-word general non-topical terms (E= 54.88 %, H= 54.21 % and S= 48.55%) and little topical and few personal terms. While comparison with LCSH subfield, we found that experts prefer topical terms for all subjects, whereas, taggers only prefer it for Economics and geographic subdivision terms for History and Sociology, but they don’t prefer chronological terms for tagging. Even, experts prefer little title-based terms (H= 196 terms, S= 195 terms and E= 175 terms) but taggers mostly prefer title-based terms (H= 673 terms, S= 564 terms and E= 444 terms) in three subjects. However, the study concludes that both vocabularies are different, but libraries can exploit those uncontrolled vocabularies and can introduce ‘hybrid metadata ecology’ which combines controlled vocabularies, classification and folksonomies for better subject access and retrieval of social science documents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on enormous firsthand materials such as archives, diaries and newspapers etc., this article tries to clarify the exchange service between the National Library of Peiping and American academics by Microfilm Camera from 1936 to 1950s. By doing so, the author analyzes the cause, process and impact of this services from the perspective of library interaction between China and the United States, and the history of the development of Chinese studies in the United States. (Article content in Chinese with English extended abstract)

In 1950, Maud Karpeles embarked on a song collecting expedition to the Appalachian Mountains with the American scholar and fieldworker Sidney Robertson Cowell. Their plan was to retrace the journeys made by Karpeles with Cecil Sharp over thirty years earlier and to revisit some of the singers they had met previously, with the aim of making tape recordings on a machine supplied by the Library of Congress. Although many of the people they targeted were dead or otherwise indisposed, they succeeded in recording fifteen survivors or close relatives of singers encountered by Sharp, and a few unknown to him. Their accounts of the trip, in diaries and letters, reveal personal tensions and a fundamentally different view of the nature of folk song, Karpeles's purist approach contrasting with Cowell's view of a dynamic tradition. Karpeles revisited the mountains in 1955 with Evelyn Wells and succeeded in adding to the total of recordings. The material they collected provides a valuable snapshot of Appalachian ballad singing at this time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taxonomy is a classification system that helps researchers conceptualize phenomena based on their dimensions and characteristics. It is an integral process involving a high complexity in understanding a subject classification. This paper aims to represent an update for the taxonomy development of Sports Science and recreational; it contributes to the prescriptive knowledge of taxonomy design and seeks to augment both rigorous taxonomies building and evaluation, including a comprehensive analysis of the expert-assigned keywords with a comparison to Library of Congress Subject Headings. This study employs comparative subject analysis as the methodology for comparing expert-assigned keywords with LCSH. The analysis will identify the similarities and differences in the classification of the taxonomy used in the UiTM Local Content Hub. The subjects used in Sports Science & Recreational Digital Collection in PTAR Local Content Hub are very minimal compared to the structured classification of subjects in the classification web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes an acquisitions trip made in mid-1992 by Library of Congress librarian Michael Neubert with then-bibliographic services contractor Mikhail Levner to Moscow (Russia, Yerevan (Armenia), Minsk (Belarus), Tbilisi (Georgia), and Chișinău (Moldova). This trip was made in response to the collapse of purchase acquisitions from these newly independent former Soviet republics in order to establish exchanges with national, academy of sciences, and university libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memoir narrates how Paul Crego came to study the Russian and Georgian languages. With a background in Soviet Studies, Crego went on to earn degrees in Divinity and Theology at Harvard and the Andover-Newton Theological School before becoming a librarian. Crego's library career, which centered on Georgian and Armenian acquisitions and cataloging, spanned more than 25 years at Harvard and the Library of Congress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Researchers are increasingly interested in better methods for assessing the pace of aging in older adults, including vocal analysis. The present study sought to determine whether paralinguistic vocal attributes improve estimates of the age and risk of mortality in older adults. Methods To measure vocal age, we curated interviews provided by male U.S. World War II Veterans in the Library of Congress collection. We used diarization to identify speakers and measure vocal features and matched recording data to mortality information. Veterans (N = 2 447) were randomly split into testing (n = 1 467) and validation (n = 980) subsets to generate estimations of vocal age and years of life remaining. Results were replicated to examine out-of-sample utility using Korean War Veterans (N = 352). Results World War II Veterans' average age was 86.08 at the time of recording and 91.28 at the time of death. Overall, 7.4% were prisoners of war, 43.3% were Army Veterans, and 29.3% were drafted. Vocal age estimates (mean absolute error = 3.255) were within 5 years of chronological age, 78.5% of the time. With chronological age held constant, older vocal age estimation was correlated with shorter life expectancy (aHR = 1.10; 95% confidence interval: 1.06–1.15; p <.001), even when adjusting for age at vocal assessment. Conclusions Computational analyses reduced estimation error by 71.94% (approximately 8 years) and produced vocal age estimates that were correlated with both age and predicted time until death when age was held constant. Paralinguistic analyses augment other assessments for individuals when oral patient histories are recorded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Library of Congress Classification system was designed during the age of colonialism, and as such, poorly represents the information-seeking behavior of present-day users. Students of Judaica are especially hindered by the limited scope of the B class (Philosophy and Religion) of the Library of Congress Classification system, which extensively classifies Christian material, but limits the thematic classification of Judaic subjects. Qualitative data collected on students of Jewish thought via a proposed questionnaire is anticipated to shed light on the specialized information-seeking behavior of Judaic students. The thematic coding and analysis of such data would assist in selecting an appropriate classification system that will complement Judaica scholarship or facilitate the creation of a novel classification system. More inclusively, such an endeavor may contribute to the understanding of specialized efforts in librarianship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on enormous firsthand materials such as archives, diaries and newspapers etc., this article tries to clarify the exchange service between the National Library of Peiping and American academics by Microfilm Camera from 1936 to 1950s. By doing so, the author analyzes the cause, process and impact of this services from the perspective of library interaction between China and the United States, and the history of the development of Chinese studies in the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the Library of Congress web site that features newspaper articles on student musicians, band and choir directors, performance venues and programs, among others.

The article explores the history of sound recording technology, focusing on the impact of inventions like the phonograph and gramophone on music accessibility and preservation. Topics discussed include the evolution of sound technologies, the role of inventors like Thomas Edison and Emile Berliner, and teaching ideas for students to explore digitized resources at the Library of Congress.

Southern United States folk music is rich in not only sound, but in voices of the past. Folk songs were created by working class individuals who described aspects of their life in connection with societal issues and events. Folk songs, now digitally archived, can serve as primary historical sources that can be used to enhance the secondary social studies U.S. history curriculum. The vast offerings of folk songs can allow students to listen, read, and analyze the lyrics to gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. South, shed the hillbilly stereotype that Southerners have been historically subjected to, understand why and how Southerners spoke out against injustices through song, and analyze the lyrics that portray the history of southern folklife. Based on the National Council for the Social Studies' Themes of Social Studies and integrating folk songs from such online sites as the Library of Congress and Smithsonian Institute, curriculum implications are presented for students to reflect on the Southerners' settings, perspectives of events and issues, and methods of protest. Modern technology's preservation of folk songs that would otherwise be absent from history not only has the power to educate, but also to keep southern folk music alive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to discuss Maria Paz Zamora-Mascuñana's Mi obolo (1924) in light of biographical and culturally meaningful findings obtained through archival work conducted in 2018 and 2022 using the Library of Congress's holdings of Philippine periodicals from the American colonial period as well as those of the Southeast Asian Newspaper collection at the East View Global Press Archive (GPA).3 The main claim here is that, with the publication of Mi obolo, Zamora-Mascuñana materialized her political will to contribute to the construction of the nation at a time when women's participation in Filipino politics was met with resistance due to the opposition of most political leaders to women's suffrage. However, Zamora-Mascuñana strategically chose the setting of the fundraising campaign organized in support of the Third Independence Mission to publish her short story collection, using as the title a contemporary buzzword--obolo ["contribution"]--which other writers, such as Jesus Balmori, had already employed to support the campaign, thus boldly placing herself and her creation on the same level as that of her male counterparts. This article's working hypothesis is that as a woman writer and a member of the elite, Zamora-Mascuñana displays in Mi obolo the ideological program that women from the Hispanophone Filipino privileged class had supported since the early 1900s. This agenda, directed towards the construction of the Philippine nation, pivoted mainly around Christian values and the rejection of American symbols of modernity. The article is divided into three main sections devoted, firstly, to an overview of Zamora-Mascuñana's production and its significance within the corpus of the Golden Age of Filipino Literature in Spanish; secondly, to the connections between Mi obolo and the Third Independence Mission; and thirdly, to the analysis of Mi obolo in relation to the discussion of womanhood at a time when evolving notions of modernity were transforming traditional gender roles. In this way, it is possible not only to characterize Zamora-Mascuñana as a Filipina patriot, but also to redefine Mi obolo as a pro-independence text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neutrality is one of the founding principles of library classification; however, systems reflect the biases of the societies that created them. Many articles have been written on bias in the Library of Congress Classification System (LCC) and its subject headings (LCSH). But how is bias evident in the Fine Arts (N) range? One answer to this question lays in the writings of Hope A. Olson who argues that systems like LCC are inherently prejudiced because of their use of universality, which results in hierarchical relationships and Derridean binaries. This is problematic because library classification, according to Olson, functions as a third-space, a place where meaning is created. Reading the Fine Arts range through Olson's work reveals a system that perpetuates bias by reconstructing the western canon of art history through its privileging of fine art over craft. While each of the fine arts are given their own subclasses, craft mediums are located under one subclass, Decorative Arts (NK), giving them a lesser than status. Artists and art historians have argued that the valuing of fine art over craft in the western canon, something clearly seen in LCC, is a consequence of patriarchal and colonialist power systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For this final installment in ARSC Journal's series on Community Audio Archiving, the Journal welcomes founding series editor, Shawn VanCour, to comment on lessons learned from the half-dozen case studies presented over its three-year run. An associate professor of Information Studies and Film, Television, and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles, Dr. VanCour conducts research on the history and preservation of sound and screen media and directs the School of Education and Information Studies Center for Preservation of Audiovisual Heritage, which assists local community organizations with digitally preserving content documenting Southern California history and culture. Dr. VanCour is also past director of the Radio Preservation Task Force for the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board, where he worked with collecting institutions throughout the United States to promote preservation of local, regional, and national radio cultures. As his essay elaborates, "coming to terms" with community audio archiving is no easy matter, with contributors throughout the series systematically challenging traditionally held conceptions of the communities represented in and served by recorded sound archives, the collections in which those recordings are housed, and the archival strategies for collecting, preservation, and access. While the successes documented by contributors' respective projects offer important lessons for future practice, Dr. VanCour also highlights several lingering challenges for community-oriented audio archiving and calls for collaborative solutions that leverage the combined knowledge and expertise of ARSC and other preservation-minded organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This article examines the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH), which is the most used subject heading system in the world and an instance of a controlled vocabulary (CV). Design/methodology/approach: The method used to examine the system is based on both authors' subject knowledge in the field of information science (IS) and the subfield of knowledge organization (KO). Core concepts in this domain were examined (1) by checking if they are present or not in the system; (2) if not, by determining whether LCSH contains alternative terms useful for searching documents about the missing concept, by examining books indexed by the Library of Congress; (3) by identifying the semantic relations between subject headings. Findings: The results demonstrate fundamental problems in the logical consistency of the representation of IS and KO in LCSH. Practical implications: The implications for CVs in general are discussed. Originality/value: No previous study has used our method to examine LCSH's coverage of IS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the importance of oral histories in preserving firsthand accounts of historical events and highlights the role of the Veterans History Project (VHP) initiated by Public Law 106-380 in 2000. It informs that Central Connecticut State University (CCSU) became an archive partner with the Library of Congress for the VHP in 2012, aiming to collect oral histories of Connecticut veterans and digitally archive additional materials.

Employed at the Library of Congress for more than a half century (1871–1923), Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852–1925) was the institution's first African American professional. His life and work engage four themes in African American history. First, Murray and his network of public intellectuals debated the most pressing social, political, and cultural issues of the time. Murray scrutinized African American literacy, history, and bibliography, on racial science, and on industrial work. He also embarked upon an African American encyclopedia. Second, Murray's life and work showed the combustible intersection of class and race that often cleaved the black community as they debated the best strategies to achieve full citizenship in Jim Crow America. Third, as a professional librarian, Murray engaged the public sphere, marshaling his intellectual authority in service of racial uplift. Finally, Murray adds to our understanding of African American social, cultural, professional, and political life in Washington, DC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue on the "Implementation of Faceted Vocabularies: An Introduction" focuses on strategies and methods for implementing faceted vocabularies in MARC and non-MARC environments in library related settings. The following introduction provides a brief description of each article in the issue. The articles are grouped around three themes: Introduction to Faceted Vocabularies, Faceted Application of Subject Terminology (FAST), and Genre Terms and Other Faceted Vocabularies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the practical application of faceted vocabularies to the cataloging of textbooks. Consistent application of faceted vocabularies, specifically Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT) and Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT), would enhance the discovery of these resources. Alternatives to special cases in Subject Heading Manual H 2187 are proposed. A case study demonstrating the application of LCDGT is provided. Figures illustrate the results of the proposed best practices. The article includes four tables that are designed to streamline term assignments. Consistent cataloging of genre and audience prepares legacy records for future automated enhancement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is an overview of the development of FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology) from its inception in the late 1990s, through its development and implementation to the work being undertaken by OCLC and the FAST Policy and Outreach Committee (FPOC) to develop and promote FAST. FPOC members explain how FAST is used by institutions in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They cover their experience of implementing FAST and the benefits they have derived. The final section considers the value of FAST as a faceted vocabulary and the potential for future development and linked data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been a continued effort among cataloging communities to implement new fields and subfields in MARC 21 to support more structured data that benefit end users. In the current article, we describe how the Orbis Cascade Alliance integrated fields and subfields of this type into Primo VE, in order to provide faceted vocabularies and other facets within the discovery interface that were otherwise unavailable from the vendor. We discuss challenges in migrating the normalization rules behind the facets, the extent to which they are being utilized by member institutions, and possible next steps for promoting their use more extensively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As institutional archives digitize their historical map collections and make them publicly available online, researchers and members of the public can pursue new methods of engagement with the materials. Certain transformations, like "georeferencing" wherein a scanned map image is turned into a geospatial raster dataset, can be time-consuming and difficult to automate, but do lend themselves to crowdsourcing, a well-accepted means by which archival processing and public engagement can be carried out in concert. Inspired by the concept of an archival commons, this article recounts the design, creation, and public participation period of a new web-based, crowdsourced georeferencing platform—something like a georeferencing commons. This work took place as a masters thesis project through 2021 and 2022, and the result continues to grow and evolve as OldInsuranceMaps.net, a public space for georeferencing historical fire insurance maps from the Library of Congress digital Sanborn Map collection. While the initial iteration of this project was built from GeoNode and GeoServer, and focused on maps of Louisiana, this article concludes with significant updates on the platform, and how it is being used by institutions and individuals well outside of Louisiana today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last three decades, US government agencies have published hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of PowerPoint files on the web. Hundreds of thousands of these files have been captured and preserved in web archives. With that noted, it remains difficult to find and interact with these files. This paper analyzes a public dataset of 1,000 PowerPoints from US government websites in the Library of Congress web archives to explore the properties of these kinds of files. This publicly available dataset published in 2019 includes a random sample of a thousand files from the more than 300,000 files that purport a PowerPoint media type in the Library of Congress web archives. The study focuses on characterizing the nature of these publications, the extent to which embedded metadata in these documents could be used to improve access to them and exploring what properties of these files are likely to be important to future users. Exploring these data provides a means to begin to understand the value and nature of PowerPoint files as a format of government publishing and government records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]