Case Study: How Hennepin County Library Catalogues Fiction
The cataloguers at Hennepin County Library (HCL) have contributed greatly to increased subject access to works of the imagination. The subject headings that HCL has created are at the core of the NoveList database, an electronic readers advisory tool.
For well over 20 years, under the direction of Sanford Berman, Head Cataloguer, HCL has worked to increase subject access to fiction. HCL began assigning genre, topical, and imaginary character and place headings to novels and short story collections for the "elemental reason that fiction frequently deals with locales, themes, and characters that readers might want to identify when they don't already know specific authors and titles." (Berman 1995, 1) Assigning genre headings allows readers to further pursue their interest in certain kinds of writing, to extend their reading beyond just a few authors. Other benefits of more extensive fiction cataloging are the greater autonomy this gives library users, making them less dependent on public service librarians and also provides reference staff doing readers' advisory work with the means to locate items of interest for readers without having to have the knowledge of all the fictional settings, topics, protagonists, and genres.
 An example of an HCL MARC tagged record. Click here to see larger version |
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The collaboration between the Library of Congress and several OCLC members in assigning subject headings to more fiction in recent years has greatly improved the situation, and new forms for fictional characters and places have entered the LCSH (previous LC policy had been to apply genre and thematic headings almost solely to collections, not to individual novels, and seldom were descriptors for imaginary persons and locations created or employed) but HCL's practices differ in some important ways:
HCL's headings for genres and subjects is often more specific and vaster than LC's, so materials can be more precisely and accurately identified. For example, HCL has created such headings as "Cookbook Novels, "Road Novels, and "Medieval Mystery Stories."
There is no consistent practice at LC for assigning genre headings, while HCL has one.
Some titles get no LC/OCLC tracings, so HCL creates them.
HCL assigns considerably more tracings and records uniquely include notes describing special aspects of a title and clarifying the scope or focus of the work.