Subject Access Needs In Academic Libraries
The current move towards improving better subject access is also a result of the changing nature of scholarship in the academic world. Tremendous upheavals have been taking place in the discipline of literary studies which fuel the need for scholarly subject catalog access to works of the imagination more than ever before. Many of the changes center on challenges to the notion of the literary canon. This canon, which previously was closed or static, is no longer as fixed. In the last twenty years, the ethnic profile of both students and faculty has undergone dramatic transformation:
"With the entry of women, Jews, Italians, Blacks et al., into English faculties has come a demand for a literature that reflects their experiences, a literature of their own. Consequently, there have been attempts from many directions to open up the canon to include more writings by members of all socio-economic, ethnic and racial groups, and the whole issue of what constitutes literary value is being re-examined." (Ranta 5-6)
Once the traditional canon has grown, or even dissipated, author and title access alone does not provide enough retrieval access points for research.
In addition, literary studies itself has altered for yet another reason. There has been a move from literary studies to literary theory, which involves studying elements of imaginative literature other than purely literary. Thus, literary scholars have a different set of values in minds as they go about their work and research:
"They might be looking for a text by a writer from a certain cultural group or a text addressing a particular topic. In these instances, author and title catalog access alone is insufficient. While the library problem is probably most acute for literary scholars, it affects people working in other disciplines as well, given the interdisciplinary trend in scholarship in recent decades"(Ranta 6).
For example, women's studies students may be requiring a fiction source that best represents the role of the housewife in the 1950's. This example would indeed require intense subject access, and appropriate subject headings for retrieval. As a consequence of changing technologies and changing scholarship, it is no wonder why subject access to fiction has taken on such a profound importance now more than ever before. One such example of an academic library that has recognized the importance for improved subject access is the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their catalogue records for fiction indicate that the cataloguers assign as many possible subject headings to works of the imagination that are available.