At Lambeth, where we have recently bought CALM, we have decided to use LCSH
as the basis of our subject indexing. At present we do the majority of our
indexing at item level - once we start with CALM will be indexing at file
level (to use ISAD(G) version 2 terminology).
The main reasons for choosing LCSH are:
- a schema including additional terms specific for the Church of England and
religion has already been in use in our printed books catalogue for 20+
years: why re-invent the wheel?
- UNESCO is at too high a level to be useful for our detailed indexing (as
others have also commented);
- UNESCO's treatment of religion and religious denominations is just not
appropriate for us to be able to use here. Eg. Its terms include Mosques
and Temples, but not Churches or Cathedrals (both of which are fairly
essential to our subject indexing!). "Christianity" is divided only using
Catholic and Protestant: what about Orthodoxy? - and siting Anglicanism
within Protestantism is disputable theology which we here need to avoid...
(I could go on, but won't).
The proposed UK Archival Thesaurus (proposed by the Unesco Thesaurus Working
Party) sounds a useful development: as others have said, we foresee the
majority of our data exchange in the medium term being at fonds level -
indeed we are already contributing to mapping projects in this way - so it's
at this level that we feel a standardised, high level thesaurus would be
most appropriate. This could be based on the current UNESCO model -
provided that it did not merely reproduce the existing structure of the
latter with which we have serious problems.
Sarah Wickham
Assistant Archivist
Lambeth Palace Library
London, SE1 7JU
http://www.lambethpalacelibrary.org
http://www.churchplansonline.org
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