LCSH is to Thesaurus as Doorbell is to Mammal: Visualizing Structural Problems in the Library of Congress Subject Headings

Abstract

The Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) has been developed over the course of more than a century, predating the semantic web by some time. Until the 1986, the only concept-to-concept relationship available was an undifferentiated "See Also" reference, which was used for both associative (RT) and hierarchical (BT/NT) connections. In that year, in preparation for the first release of the headings in machine readable MARC Authorities form, an attempt was made to automatically convert these "See Also" links into the standardized thesaural relations.