On Mon, June 13, 2011 1:49 pm, Tom Morris wrote:

> Where do Open Library subject terms come from?

>From the mind of man (used in a generic sense to include all genders).

> Is there any
> correspondence with the Library of Congress Subject Headings or any
> other, so called, "controlled" terminology set?

[snip]

The OL subject classifications are not controlled in any way. What you call a
"crime" novel someone else may call a "detective" novel, and a third person
may call a "mystery" novel. There may or may not be a correspondence between
OL subject classifications and controlled terminology sets depending on
whether or not the person entering the classification had a correspondence in
mind when she added it. I suspect that more often than not there is a
correspondence because the data came from MARC records from an institutional
repository, or was copied from the metadata page of an actual printed book.

In the OL world, however, consistency in subject matter classifications is
accidental, not intentional.

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