Information for Librarians

Teaching Subject Headings:

Ili-l@ala.org, Thursday, August 7, 2014 – Beth Young

I heard another librarian refer to subject headings as academic hashtags, and I find this resonates well with the current generation of students.  I usually say something like, "When you post a picture on Facebook or twitter, you might add a hashtag describing that photo.  Did you know that you can also search google for a specific hashtag? For example, if I googled #yolo2014, I would get a full listing of all the facebook statuses, instagram photos, and tweets that include that hashtag.  Similarly, in an article databases, articles are given academic hashtags called subject headings that describe what the article is about.  You can search for articles with a specific subject heading, and the results will only be articles that have that subject heading assigned to it.  Unlike hashtags, though, these subject headings are chosen from a restricted list created by the people who work for the database.  This is helpful for you, because it means you don't have to think of every single variation of a word to search by a subject heading, unlike our hashtag example (if you wanted every social media post with a hashtag relating to yolo, you would have to search #yolo2014, #yolo14, #2014yolo, etc.)."

Keywords and Subject Headings – Two Ways of Searching by William Badke: https://prezi.com/frkrqq_wznab/keywords-and-subject-headings-two-ways-of-searching/