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A controlled vocabulary is a set of standard terms used to describe the contents of books found in the library. The CSCC Library uses Library of Congress Subject headings. This is a huge list of descriptive words and phrases. Most of the records you will find in LOIS have at least one subject heading
A controlled vocabulary is an important way of drawing similar material together under one topic.
For example...
What if you were looking for some information about the Civil War. There are a number of terms you could use:
- American Civil War
- United States Civil War
- War Between the States
- War of Succession
By using Library of Congress Subject Headings, all of those ideas can be found by searching for:
United States - History - Civil War, 1861-1865
You may not know exactly what subject heading to use. That's where LOIS steps in to give you some help. Let's stick to the Civil War example and look at the results of a search. What would happen if you searched for War Between the States?
LOIS tells you that the heading you searched for is not used. But it also tells you what the correct subject heading is for this library (see the red arrow?), and gives you the option of clicking on that heading instead. Try doing that in one of those old fashioned card catalogs!
