Reviving the Hennepin County Authority File

Engaging With Critical Cataloging Past and Present webinar series
This webinar series will introduce Library of Congress Subject Headings from the perspective of catalogers engaged in subject authority work. Learn about some of the key historical figures and projects in Minnesota radical cataloging. Hear from contemporary catalogers inspired by this radical history to continue working towards critical, equitable, and respectful cataloging standards.

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May 22nd Webinar
Reviving the Hennepin County Authority File
Sanford Berman and his colleagues at Hennepin County Library (HCL) created a unique subject authority file for the HCL collection (1973 to 1999) and demonstrated that a catalog is far more than a list of holdings or a list of terms. David Lesniaski will give a short overview of the process used to recreate this catalog, but will focus on examples demonstrating the utility of a catalog that links subject headings to each other and to relevant bibliographic records in a coherent and user-friendly manner. He argues that a catalog, at its best, shows relationships between terms and leads users from what they know to an expanded conceptual map of vocabulary, concepts, and bibliographic items relevant to their inquiry. The HCL catalog and subject authority file can still serve as a model for subject authority practice today, because of the sustained intellectual effort of Sanford and his colleagues over several decades. A catalog of alternative terms that show conceptual relationships could be more useful to practicing catalogers than the plethora of vocabulary lists currently circulating.

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