Searching by Subject

Use subject searching to find information ABOUT your topic.

Subject searching is effective because it uses a predetermined controlled vocabulary to express the theme or content of an item.  Most academic libraries, including your college library, use the Library of Congress Subject Headings as their controlled vocabulary.

What is controlled vocabulary?

As you already know, there are many ways to say the same thing in our language. For instance, if someone tells you they saw a cute:

Puppy

You would know that they were saying that they had seen a DOG. Your brain is able to take each of those words and translate them into the concept of DOG.

But a computer is not as smart as you. Unless programmed to do so, when a computer reads the word PUPPY, it only sees a group of letters that are different than the group of letters that make up the word CANINE.

A subject descriptor is a standardized vocabulary term for words with the same meaning.  Indexers use subject descriptors or subject headings so that they can uniformly categorize different materials on the same subject and provide a consistent term for you to use to retrieve the items you need.

For example, if you did a search for :

the search would not find the book title: Fido : A Complete Dog Obedience Book From "Desire to Finish." Although this book might be exactly what you're looking for, the search for "puppy training" would not find it because the term that you used is not in the catalog record.  A better way to find everything having to do with training puppies, Scottish Terriers, canines, or mutts is to perform a subject search using the term dogs--training. Dogs--Training is the Library of Congress Subject Heading for this topic and is used to identify every item in the library catalog on the subject.

When doing a subject search, type double hyphens (--) in between the main topic and sub-topics.