"The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) comprise a thesaurus (in the information science sense, a controlled vocabulary) of subject headings, maintained by the United States Library of Congress, for use in bibliographic records."
Controlled vocabulary terms used to index materials by subject, allowing users to search for items on a particular topic.
Bibliographic control: The process of organizing and describing bibliographic information to enable effective retrieval and management of information resources.
Authority control: The process of establishing and maintaining consistent forms of names, titles, and subject headings in bibliographic records to aid in retrieval and avoid ambiguity.
Subject analysis: The process of identifying the main topics or themes of a work and selecting the appropriate subject headings to describe them.
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): A controlled vocabulary of subject headings used by the Library of Congress and many other libraries to describe the content of books and other materials.
Sears List of Subject Headings: Another controlled vocabulary of subject headings used primarily by public libraries.
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC): A classification system that groups books based on subject matter, assigning them a unique call number to aid in retrieval and shelving.
Universal Decimal Classification (UDC): Another classification system that functions similarly to the DDC but is used more widely in Europe.
MARC (Machine Readable Cataloging) format: A standardized format for bibliographic records that enables them to be computer-readable.
Linked Data: A method of linking bibliographic data to other related data sources, enabling deeper and more meaningful discovery and access to resources.
FAST (Faceted Application of Subject Terminology): A simplified version of LCSH that uses faceted controlled vocabularies to enhance retrieval.
Thesauri: Controlled vocabularies that enable users to search for terms related to a specific subject, concept, or theme.
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): This is a standardized system of subject headings that has been widely adopted by libraries in the US and around the world.
Medical Subject Headings (MeSH): Used by the National Library of Medicine, this is a controlled vocabulary thesaurus used for indexing articles for MEDLINE and PubMed.
Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC): This is a numerical system that is used to classify books and other materials in libraries based on subject.
Universal Decimal Classification (UDC): This is another decimal system used to classify documents, books, and other materials.
Sears List of Subject Headings: This is a subject heading system developed by the H.W. Wilson Company and used mainly in small libraries.
Thesaurus of Engineering and Scientific Terms (TEST): This is a controlled vocabulary used to index scientific and technical materials.
Art and Architecture Thesaurus (AAT): This is a controlled vocabulary developed by the Getty Research Institute that is used to index art and architecture materials.
Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms: This is a controlled vocabulary that is used to describe the genre/form of materials.
Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names (TGN): This is another controlled vocabulary developed by the Getty Research Institute that is used to index geographic materials.
National Agricultural Library Thesaurus (NAL): This is a controlled vocabulary used by the National Agricultural Library to index agricultural materials.
"Maintained by the United States Library of Congress."
"LC Subject Headings are an integral part of bibliographic control, which is the function by which libraries collect, organize, and disseminate documents."
"It was first published in 1898, a year after the publication of Library of Congress Classification (1897)."
"The last print edition was published in 2016."
"Access to the continuously revised vocabulary is now available via subscription and free services."
"Subject headings are normally applied to every item within a library's collection and facilitate a user's access to items in the catalog that pertain to similar subject matter."
"Subject headings... save time finding items of related subject matter."
"Only searching for items by 'title' or other descriptive fields, such as 'author' or 'publisher', would take more time and potentially miss locating many items because of the ineffective and inefficient search capability." Quotes from the paragraph that answer the questions: