Filed under: controlled language, libraries, subject headings, tech services
Thanks to Ididnotknowthat’s weblog, I finally have something new to blog about — subject headings 
On the heels of my post about natural language, continued reading of “Everything is Miscellaneous”, the inspiration of Ididnotknowthat’s blog, and a close inspection of LibraryThing today — my head is near to exploding trying to think about the implications in changing the way the library catalogs and the way libraries assign subject headings.
It seems to me that, from the beginning of cataloging and librarianship, one of the jobs of the librarian has been to “translate” the terms the customer is using into terms the library uses. The extreme of this situation, for those of you who have worked the IS desk, is when a customer asks about “that one book that was on that one show that comes on every night before Oprah maybe two weeks ago”. It’s hard enough to translate that into correct English 
let alone help determine what book the customer might be referring to. A more classic example is when, in recent years, if a customer wanted a book on cooking for diabetics the librarian had to translate that to “diabetes — diet therapy — recipes”.
But with the advent on online catalogs, the internet, etc, it seems like keywording and tagging, to some extent, solve that difficulty in translation. If a website is sufficiently tagged by an assortment of visitors, then those visitors have essentially “cataloged” the website but in a language that more people can easily understand. Although controlled language gave us boundaries within which we could work as long as we were restricted to index cards, now that we have online catalogs and basically limitless boundaries for the number of subject headings that can be applied, as long as a sufficient number of tags or keywords have been applied to the record to account for the wide range of terms that people may search under, then I think keywording can be the end of controlled language.
And yet — keywording *is* still controlled language, isn’t it?
I mean, if we take a book like Moby Dick for instance and allow a world of visitors to a website apply keywords to the record based on what they feel the book is about, except for the random person who randomly applies some keyword that has nothing to do with anything (those could be removed), it seems unlikely you’d find keywords for space travel, southern cooking, or metadata. What I’m getting at is, despite the free and uncontrolled nature of people keywording as they please, I think a general consensus of terms would be achieved. And the language would be natural in the sense that it would be the language that people casually use to describe things. It would certainly beat trying to get everyone to come up with the one controlled language term Physeteridae (sperm whales). And it would certainly go well beyond “Whaling ships — Fiction” and “Ship captains — Fiction” (generally speaking the only subject headings attached to Moby Dick, and not even close to what the book is really about).
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