Revisiting the Syntactical and Structural Analysis
of Library of Congress Subject Headings for
the Digital Environment
Kwan Yi
School of Library and Information Science, University of Kentucky, 331 Little Library Building, Lexington,
Kentucky 40506-0224. E-mail: kwan.yi@uky.edu
Lois Mai Chan
School of Library and Information Science, University of Kentucky, 337 Little Library Building, Lexington,
Kentucky 40506-0224. E-mail: loischan@uky.edu
With the current information environment characterized
by the proliferation of digital resources, including col-
laboratively created and shared resources, Library of
Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) is facing the chal-
lenges of effective and efficient subject-based organi-
zation and retrieval of digital resources. To explore the
feasibility of utilizing LCSH in a digital environment, we
might need to revisit its basic characteristics. The objec-
tives of our study were to analyze LCSH in both syntactic
and relational structures, to discover the structural char-
acteristics of LCSH, and to identify problems and issues
for the feasibility of LCSH as an effective subject access
tool. This study reports and discusses issues raised by
the syntactic and hierarchical structures of LCSH that
present challenges to its use in a networked environment.
Given the results of this study, we recommend a num-
ber of provisional future directions for the development
of LCSH towards further becoming a viable system for
digital and networked resources.
Introduction
Since its inception in the 19th century, Library of Congress
Subject Headings (LCSH) has been widely used in the library
community as a tool for creating and providing subject access
points to traditional library collections. LCSH is a subject
vocabulary covering all general disciplines, the largest gen-
eral indexing vocabulary in the English language, and a
de facto universal controlled vocabulary (O’Neill & Chan,
2003).
In the past decade, however, the long traditional role of
LCSH has been further expanded for and applied to the con-
trol of digital resources. A series of projects and applications
Received October 23, 2009; revised November 23, 2009; accepted November
25, 2009
© 2010 ASIS&T • Published online 28 January 2010 in Wiley InterScience
(www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.21295
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 61(4):677–687, 2010
have utilized LCSH for subject access of digital information
in an automated manner: an automatic assignment of LCSH to
cataloging records for electronic resources (Frank & Paynter,
2005); an association of LCSH to books in the Google Book
Search project to facilitate access to a group of works on
the same subject (Riley, 2007); and a potential linking of
social tags and LCSH with the goal of organizing networked
resources through a combination of tags and LCSH (Yi &
Chan, 2009). Regarding the question of where LCSH stands
currently in becoming a viable system in networked environ-
ments, Chan (2000, p. 172) has stated, “LCSH can become
a versatile system that is capable of functioning in hetero-
geneous environments and can serve as the united basis
for supporting diversified uses while maintaining semantic
interoperability among them.”
Furthermore, in a networked environment, a vast num-
ber of heterogeneous information resources in distributed
information repositories have been organized with differ-
ent controlled vocabularies and different organization sys-
tems. The issue of interoperability of controlled vocabularies
has been raised with regard to cross-repositories searching
and cross-controlled vocabularies searching (Zeng & Chan,
2004). Interoperability between LCSH and a number of other
controlled vocabularies, including Medical Subject Head-
ings (MeSH; Olson, 2001), Dewey Decimal Classification
(DDC; Vizine-Goetz, 1996), and the Education Resources
Information Center (ERIC) thesaurus (Vizine-Goetz, Hickey,
Houghton, & Thompson, 2004), has been explored in several
projects in recent years.
Automated LCSH-based subject indexing of digital infor-
mation entails the following requirements:
• Automated identification of the appropriate subjects of digital
resources
• Automated selection of LC subject headings relevant to the
identified subjects
 To meet these requirements, the syntactic and semantic
structures of LCSH must be explored. The Association of
Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS) Sub-
committee on Metadata and Subject Analysis “recommends
separating the consideration regarding semantics from that
relating to application syntax, in other words, distinguish-
ing between the vocabulary (LCSH per se) and the indexing
system (i.e., how LCSH is applied in a particular imple-
mentation). This recommendation involves several important
concepts that need to be reviewed. Semantics and syntax are
two distinct aspects of a controlled vocabulary” (Chan, 2000,
p. 167).
The current digital information environment may require
us to re-visit LCSH for its utilization of organizing Inter-
net resources so that a blend of diverse information resources
from traditional library collections, networked resources, and
digital resources can be organized under a single umbrella
of LCSH. To explore the feasibility of utilizing LCSH in the
current environment, its basic characteristics should be exam-
ined in the context of automated assignment of LCSHs to
diverse resources. The objective of the present study is to ana-
lyze LCSH in both syntactic and relational structures, to
discover the structural characteristics of LCSH, and to iden-
tify problems and issues for the feasibility of LCSH as
an effective subject control tool for traditional and digi-
tal resources. This study attempts to answer the following
three research questions and discuss their implications for
employing LCSH in the current digital environment:
• What are the characteristics of LCSH in syntactic structure?
• What are the characteristics of LCSH in local hierarchical
structure?
• What are the characteristics of LCSH in global hierarchical
structure?
Related Work
We will examine previous researches on analyzing LCSH
itself and then review research projects and applications with
regard to the LCSH-based access and organization of digital
resources in the past 15 years.
Analysis of LCSH
LCSH has long been the target of research in subject-
centered information organizations. However, there have
been few comprehensive studies analyzing the entire LCSH
itself.Among the few is an OCLC research project (Markey &
Vizine-Goetz, 1988), which examined the characteristics
of authority records for topical and geographic headings
in LCSH and the cross-reference structure (see also refer-
ences and see also from tracings) in the records. Based on
the analysis of 160,706 subject authority machine-readable
cataloging (MARC) records, the project reported statistical
results of various components: topical and geographical sub-
ject headings, orphan headings, subdivided and unsubdivided
established headings, and subject heading forms. Recently,
678 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
DOI: 10.1002/asi
in a study of the development of an LCSH visualization tool,
Yi and Chan (2008) presented a display of hierarchical struc-
tures (tree structures) embedded in the entire LCSH via a
complete set of subject authority records. The LCSH visual-
ization tool also can be used to identify locations of a single
heading in multiple trees along with their paths within the
hierarchical structures.
In other studies, LCSH was closely examined in rela-
tion to other controlled vocabularies. A Khosh-khuui (1985)
dissertation examined the associated relationship between
LCSH and standard library classification schemes via a set
of cataloging records (Khosh-khui, 1985). Larson (1992)
attempted to automatically classify bibliographic MARC
records into Library of Congress Classification (LCC) based
on title and subject headings appearing in the bibliographic
records; his automated classification method using a vec-
tor space model was built and tested only for the LC class
Z. Vizine-Goetz (1998) conducted a study of mapping the
most relevant LC subject headings to DDC numbers. Her
study measured the similarity between LCSH and DDC by
log-likelihood ratio and calculated the most closely asso-
ciated pairs of LCSH and DDC numbers. A more recent
OCLC research project (Vizine-Goetz, Hickey, Houghton, &
Thompson, 2004) summarized various OCLC vocabulary
projects exploring the direct or indirect mappings among var-
ious subject heading lists (including LCSH), thesauri, and
library classification schemes.
Similar to the OCLC project (Markey & Vizine-Goetz,
1988), the present study examines and analyzes a full set
of LC subject headings. Our study goes beyond the OCLC
project in two aspects: (a) analyzing LC subject headings
in the context of the hierarchical structures embedded in
LCSH and (2) re-examining and updating the study of syn-
tactic structures in LCSH nearly two decades after the OCLC
project.
LCSH-Based Access and Organization of
Digital Resources
LCSH and Folksonomy. Collaborative tagging (often call
social tagging or social bookmarking) is a new approach
in collecting and organizing information resources on the
Web. In this context, information resources are selected, col-
lected, and indexed by information users or seekers rather
than by information professionals. Web applications and sys-
tems created and operated on the basis of social tagging are
collectively called Web 2.0. In a Web 2.0 application, users
create and assign their own keywords or tags to resources. A
set of such user tags is collectively called a folksonomy (Van-
der Wal, 2007). Folksonomy plays a major role in organizing,
accessing, and retrieving resources in the Web 2.0 envi-
ronment. This is the opposite approach of using controlled
vocabularies in information organization and control.
Advantages and disadvantages of folksonomies as opposed
to controlled vocabularies in information management
have been widely discussed and debated (Mathes, 2004;
Quintarelli, 2005). To achieve the best result in informa-
tion organization and indexing, a bridge between folk-
sonomies and controlled vocabularies is often suggested
(Rosenfeld, 2005; Rolla, 2009; Chan, 2009). Yi (2008) pro-
posed a conceptual framework for integrating LCSH into a
folksonomy-based information application to improve Infor-
mation Retrieval (IR). Yi and Chan (2009) conducted a close
examination of the overlap between LCSH and folkson-
omy in Delicious (http://delicious.com) and the distribution
of folksonomy over the hierarchical structure embedded in
LCSH. Chan (2009) examined the practice of social tagging
in LibraryThing and compared it to LCSH-based traditional
indexing.A more practical mapping between folksonomy and
LCSH can be found in a recent study by Yi (in review), which
compares the semantic similarity of LC subject headings and
social tags using five different statistical metrics. The recent
studies mentioned above represent a series of attempts to
link folksonomy and LC subject headings, moving toward an
integration of Web 2.0 resources and traditional information
systems using LCSH.
Google Book Search and LibraryThing
Google Book Search (http://books.google.com/) is a
Google project that digitizes books in individual libraries and
makes their textual content universally accessible, with the
goal of 15 millions books scanned over the next decade (New
York Times). LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) is
a social cataloging Web application to help people catalog
their books and to store and share personal library catalogs
and book lists, with about 43 million books cataloged as of
August 18, 2009. LC subject headings play a direct or indi-
rect role of bridging the services via the OCLC WorldCat
bibliographic database so that easy access to similar items
across different applications on the same subject becomes
viable (Riley, 2007).
INFOMINE
INFOMINE (http://infomine.ucr.edu/) is a virtual library
of selected Internet resources aiming at university-level aca-
demic personnel such as faculty, students, teaching and
research staffs, etc. The virtual library collection includes
scholarly Internet resources such as databases, electronic
journals and books, articles, online library card catalogs, etc.
(http://infomine.ucr.edu/about/index.shtml). Each cataloging
record was manually prepared for an Internet resource in
INFOMINE, and a LCC number was automatically assigned
to the record. The appropriate LCC number is estimated
from LC subject headings, using a support vector machine
(SVM) algorithm (Frank & Paynter, 2004). Frank and Paynter
extended Larson’s study by estimating LCC numbers for
all LCC classes and demonstrated the practical use of these
numbers. Manually assigned LC subject headings and auto-
matically assigned LCC numbers are two essential elements
of the INFOMINE cataloging records.
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
BUBL
BUBL (http://bubl.ac.uk/), originally called “Bulletin
Board for Libraries,” is an information service comprising
selected Internet resources covering all academic subject
areas, particularly for the library and higher education com-
munities (Gold, 1996). BUBL uses LCSH for specific subject
categories of the resources and the DDC system to classify
the resources. As in INFOMINE, all resources stored are cat-
aloged and assigned LCSH-based subject keywords, DDC
numbers, etc. Like INFOMINE, LC subject headings are
manually assigned to records (Dawson, 1997).
InterCat: A Catalog of Internet Resources
This project (July, 1995), led by OCLC, was a collabo-
rative effort at creating a database of MARC bibliographic
records for Internet resources. More than 200 voluntary
participants from libraries and information centers were
involved in the creation of a collection of about 2,500 records.
LCSH was a source for subject entry of the records. The
database was publicly available via the InterCat Catalog
Web site (http://www.oclc.org:6990). However, it is no longer
available.
Electronic Journal Miner
Electronic Journal Miner was a project of collecting a
wide range of electronic serials, including e-magazines
and newsletters, which were offered by the publisher and
available over the Internet. To facilitate easy access to
e-journals, a series of indexes including LC subject headings
was provided. The Web site no longer exists.
In previous attempts of organizing and accessing net-
worked digital resources using LCSH described above, the
assignment of LC subject headings to resources has been
made manually in all cases, a great challenge in view of the
massive size of resources available. So far, automatic meth-
ods for labelling resources with subject terms remain illusive.
With the enormously popular activity of social tagging of
networked resources, a social tag-based approach through
linking folksonomy and LCSH appears feasible toward the
goal of automatic assignment of subject terms. The moti-
vation for the present study can be traced to the studies
(Vizine-Goetz, Hickey, Houghton, & Thompson, 2004; Yi &
Chan, 2009) of linking LCSH to other controlled vocabular-
ies and folksonomy. The hypothesis is that the extraction of
the syntactic structure and semantic relationships existing in
LCSH and the utilization of the syntactic and semantic infor-
mation to the linking study can improve the quality of the
linking. The next section explores the embedded hierarchical
structures and syntactical characteristics of LCSH.
Structures Embedded on Library of Congress
Subject Headings
A main heading in LCSH can be linked to two different
levels of LCSH-embedded hierarchical structures: one on a
679
DOI: 10.1002/asi
local level and the other on a global level. The local-level
hierarchical structure of an LC subject heading refers to a list
of subject headings that have hierarchical relationship with
the heading at one immediate level above or below in their
hierarchical positions (broader or narrower). The global-level
hierarchical structure of a LC subject heading is similar to the
local-level, except that subject headings are hierarchically
related at one or more levels. Based on the hypothesis that
the hierarchical structures of a given subject heading provide
semantic contexts of the heading, the two immediate levels of
hierarchical relationships of a subject heading can be viewed
as two layers of semantic information related to a particular
subject heading. These two structures are called local rela-
tional structure and global hierarchical structure. Each of the
structures will be described below.
Local Relational Structure
A local relational structure (LRS) of LCSH comprises a
manifestation of a main heading and its immediately related
terms in equivalence, hierarchical, and associative relation-
ships. There is a one-to-one relationship between an LRS and
a main heading: given a main heading, a corresponding LRS
exists, and vice versa. There are no LRS for lead-in terms.
There are three relationships that may occur in an LRS.
First, the equivalence relationship exists between a valid or
authorized heading and its synonyms. Reciprocal references,
expressed by the codes USE and UF (meaning used for), are
made between the authorized or preferred heading and the
non-preferred terms, for example,
Subject analysis
USE Subject cataloging
Subject cataloging
UF Subject analysis
The term “subject cataloging” in bold is an authorized
heading. The term “subject analysis” is an unauthorized term
corresponding to the authorized heading.
Second, the hierarchical relationship, expressed by the
codes BT for broader term and NT for narrower term,
links an established or preferred heading A (Cataloging) to
another established heading B (Subject cataloging), such
that heading B is a member (i.e., a narrower term) of the
class represented by the heading A, and that the heading A
is a broader term over B. As the terms involved in BT or
NT are directly above and below each other in the hierar-
chy, they must be matched by the reversed relationship, as
demonstrated by the following example:
Subject cataloging
BT Cataloging
Cataloging
NT Subject cataloging
In this case, the first entry will appear in an LRS for the
heading “Subject cataloging” and the second one will appear
in an LRS for the heading “Cataloging.”
680 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
DOI: 10.1002/asi
Third, the associative relationship, expressed by the code
RT meaning related term, indicates two headings associated
in some manner other than hierarchical. For example,
Ornithology
RT Birds
Birds
RT Ornithology
As shown in the example above, the associative rela-
tionship is reciprocal. That is, when a heading A is in an
associative relationship with another heading B, then B is also
in an associative relationship with A. The first entry will
appear in an LRS for the authorized heading of “Ornithol-
ogy” and the second entry will appear in an LRS for the
authorized heading of “Birds.”
Hierarchical references enable the display of systemati-
cally related headings that are more general or more specific
than the heading being consulted. No matter the level at which
one enters the hierarchy, one can follow either BTs or NTs
to find the broadest or most specific heading available. The
following headings illustrate this:
An example of an LRS for the established heading
“Subject cataloging” is shown below:
Subject cataloging
UF Subject analysis
BT Cataloging
Content analysis (Communication)
Indexing
NT Classification—Books
Online library catalogs—Subject access
Subject headings
World Wide Web—Subject access
This specific LRS has one UF, three BTs, and four NTs
without any RT. Based on the display of this LRS, the user
may infer that “Subject cataloging” will appear in three other
LRSs as an NT and in four other LRSs as a BT, because of
the reciprocal property between BT and NT.
Global Hierarchical Structure
A global hierarchical structure (GHS) of LCSH is a display
of a group of preferred subject headings that are hierarchi-
cally connected to each other directly or indirectly. As the
hierarchical relationship among the LC subject headings is
presented in LRSs, GHSs can be built from LRSs. That is, a
GHS is a concatenation of all possible LRSs that can be linked
to each other in terms of BT/NT relationships. Figure 1 dis-
plays a portion of a GHS containing the “Subject cataloging”
heading.
As shown in Figure 1, a GHS can be represented by a
tree that comprises nodes (each of which corresponds to an
entry in a row) and links (each of which is represented by
left indentation) between them. In a GHS tree, an established
LC subject heading is denoted by a tree node. Broader terms
are denoted by the parent (upper in indentation) nodes of

FIG. 1. A part of a GHS tree including “Subject cataloging” as a tree node,
obtained from using the LCSH visualization tool (Yi and Chan, 2009).
established terms, and narrower terms are represented by
the child (lower in indentation) nodes of established terms.
Headings at the same indentation are called sibling nodes.
Compare the GHS shown in Figure 1 with the “Subject
cataloging” LRS in the LRS section. The LRS shows that
the heading “Subject cataloging” has three different BTs and
four different NTs. The GHS in Figure 1 shows only one BT
and one NT. The rest of the BTs and NTs can appear in other
parts of the same GHS or in other GHSs. Also, note that the
BT or NT used in this GHS can occur in other GHSs as well.
Applying such an algorithm for building GHSs implied in
LCSH yields a set of n independent GHS trees, independent
in that there is no single hierarchical link across any two out
of the n trees. In other words, there is no hierarchical rela-
tionship found between any two nodes in different trees. This
independent property leads us to the hypothesis that each of
the n GHS trees represents and supports a separate concept
or topic and that no two concepts represented by two inde-
pendent trees overlap in hierarchy. The overall hierarchical
structure of LC subject headings can, therefore, be viewed as
n number of independent GHS trees.
Analysis of LCSH: Results
Dataset
Instances of LCSH can be found in diverse sources:
printed versions; bibliographic records; Web applications
through the LC Web site (http://authorities.loc.gov) or
Classification Web (http://classificationweb.net/); and elec-
tronic versions available for purchase at the LC Web
site (http://www.loc.gov/cds/contact.html). Recently, LC
released a set of LC subject authority records as a public
domain dataset. For this study, the RDF/XML June 05 2009
version of LC authority records was downloaded from the
LC site (http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/). It comprises
342,684 subject authority records. A series of computer
programs in Perl was written for the analysis.
Part-of-Speech Tagging
To identify adjectival phrase headings, two popular part-
of-speech (POS) taggers were employed: MontyTagger
version 1.2 (http://web.media.mit.edu/∼hugo/montytagger/)
and TreeTagger (http://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/projekte/cor
plex/TreeTagger/DecisionTreeTagger.html#Linux). A POS
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
tagger algorithm reads text and assigns each word of the
text an appropriate POS tag, such as noun, verb, adjective,
etc. The two taggers were built on the basis of different
approaches: rule-based and probabilistic approaches. The
Monty Tagger, a rule-based POS tagger, implements Eric
Brill’s transformational-based learning POS tagger (Brill,
1994) that is known as an effective tagger (Hasan, UzZaman,
Khan, 2007). TreeTagger (Schmid, 1994), developed at the
Institute for Computational Linguistics of the University
of Stuttgart, is one of the popular probabilistic approach-
based POS taggers (Marcus, Santorini, & Marcinkiewicz,
1993). Both taggers were constructed on the basis of a
same comprehensive text corpus, the Penn Treebank tag set
(http://www.cis.upenn.edu/∼treebank/).
Syntactic Analysis of LC Subject Headings
The set of subject authority records comprises 341,745
preferred headings (or established headings) and 939 anno-
tated card (AC) headings. AC headings, a separate set of
subject headings exclusively for juvenile collections, are not
included in this study. The remaining preferred headings are
separated into two groups of headings: unsubdivided and sub-
divided. Of the 341,745 preferred headings, there are 231,488
unsubdivided subject headings (about 67.7%) and 110,257
subdivided subject headings (about 32.3%). 80,400 (23.52%)
of the established headings contain one subdivision, and
29,857 (8.74%) have two or more subdivisions.
The percentages of headings are closely comparable
to the outcome of an earlier study (Markey & Vizine-
Goetz, 1988), which examined a total of 160,706 established
headings—less than 50% of the total number of head-
ings used in the present study: Markey and Vizine-Goetz
(1988, p. 67) reported 68.35% (vs. 67.7% from our result),
23.01% (vs. 23.52%), and 8.64% (vs. 8.74) for the percent-
ages of headings with no subdivision, one subdivision, and
multiple subdivisions, respectively. Even with new head-
ings added during the last two decades, the distribution of
headings in terms of subdivision has remains more or less
the same.
Table 1 shows the frequency distribution of LC subject
headings over the number of words per subject heading. As
shown in the table, two-term subject headings (36.9%) are
the most common. After that, three-term (23.9%), four-term
(14.5%), and single-term (12.6%) subject headings follow in
decreasing order of frequency. The two longest headings con-
tain 15 words each. The pattern of frequency distribution is
shown in Table 1: except in the case of single-term headings,
as the number of terms per heading decreases, the number of
headings increases.
Table 2 shows a frequency distribution of LC subject
headings with one or more subdivisions over the number of
subdivisions. Among subdivided subject headings, 72.9% are
subdivided once, and 27.1% are subdivided multiple times.
The largest number of subdivisions per subject heading is five.
As the number of subdivisions per subject heading increases,
the number of headings sharply decreases.
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DOI: 10.1002/asi
TABLE 1. Frequency distribution of a total of 231,488 unsubdivided In LCSH, adjectival phrase headings consist of a noun
Library of Congress subject headings. or noun phrase with an adjectival modifier in the form of
No. of words per heading No. of headings only (ratio) a common adjective or a noun modifier (Chan (2008). The
TreeTagger and the MontyTagger were used to count all pos-
1 29,293 (12.6%) sible forms. As shown in Table 3, the number of adjectival
2 85,484 (36.9%)
phrase headings found with TreeTagger is 43,195 (12.6%)
3 55,315 (23.9%)
4 33,462 (14.5%) and that with MontyTagger is 38,737 (11.3%).
5 16,060 (6.9%) Conjunctive phrase headings contain the word “and” to
6 6,953 (3.0%) connect two or more nouns, noun phrases, or both with or
7 2,639 (1.1%) without modifiers. A count of conjunctive phrase headings
8 1,292 (0.6%)
that contained the word “and” were counted by checking
9 561 (0.2%)
10 230 (0.1%) whether it contains “and” or not, which yielded a result of
11 121 (0.1%) 9,061 (2.7%).
12 43 (0.0%) Prepositional phrase headings contain a preposition con-
13 23 (0.0%) necting two or more nouns, noun phrases, or both with
14 10 (0.0%)
or without modifiers. Various prepositions occur in this
15 2 (0.0%)
type of heading. There is a list of 70 of the more com-
mon one-word prepositions at http://www.englishclub.com/
TABLE 2. Frequency distribution of a total of 110,257 subdivided Library
vocabulary/prepositions.htm. Prepositional phrase headings
of Congress subject headings. were examined in three different ways: (a) headings con-
taining at least one preposition from the list above without
No. of subdivision involved No. of headings (ratio) any semantic consideration, (b) headings counted using Tree-
1 80,400 (72.9%) Tagger, and (c) headings counted using MontyTagger. Both
2 26,454 (24.0%) TreeTagger and MontyTagger use the same tag coding sys-
3 3,164 (2.9%) tem, the Penn Treebank tag set. The tag set poses an ambiguity
4 226 (0.2%) in part-of-speech tags. For example, the Penn Treebank tag set
5 13 (0.0%)
uses “IN” for a preposition or a subordinating conjunction.
Therefore, it is often difficult to distinguish the two com-
ponents even by looking at the following tags because they
TABLE 3. Syntactical analysis of Library of Congress subject headings.
can share a clause as a following tag. Therefore, all headings
No. of subject including the tag “IN” were counted for preposition or sub-
Syntactic structure headings (ratio) ordinating conjunction, and the result was used as the upper
Adjectival phrase headings (with TreeTagger) 43,195 (12.6%) limit of the number of prepositional phrase headings. The fre-
Adjectival phrase headings (with MontyTagger) 38,737 (11.3%) quencies of prepositional phrase headings are 19,117 (5.6%)
Conjunctive phrase headings 9,061 (2.7%) when counted with a list of prepositions, 20,304 (5.9%) with
Prepositional phrase headings (with a list 19,117 (5.6%) TreeTagger, and 327 (0.1%) with MontyTagger, respectively.
of prepositions)
In inverted phrase headings, the order of words is inverted,
Prepositional phrase headings (with TreeTagger) 20,304 (5.9%)
Prepositional phrase headings (with MontyTagger) 327 (0.1%) so that the more significant word precedes the less signifi-
Inverted phrase headings 45,426 (13.3%) cant word(s), e.g., “Chemistry, Organic.” As shown in this
Free-floating phrase headings with the current 477 (0.1%) example, the inverted form contains a comma. Therefore, the
free-floating components only comma is used in order to approximate the number of inverted
Free-floating phrase headings with the current 6,313 (1.8%)
phrase headings. As a result, the number obtained is likely to
free-floating components plus old ones
Qualifier 74,481 (21.8%) be greater than the actual correct number of inverted phrase
Qualifier without any heading for preceding term 73,415 headings because commas are used in headings for other pur-
Qualifier with a separate heading for preceding term 1,066 poses as well. Therefore, the number is treated as the upper
limit of the number of inverted phrase headings. The result
shows that as many as 13.3% of the total of 231,488 LC
We then analyzed LCSH in its syntactical structure. Each subject headings contain a comma.
LC subject heading, whether topical/form heading or head- A free-floating heading is a type of heading with free-
ing for named entities, comprises one or more words (refer floating components which may be combined with any exist-
to Table 1). We focus here on counting various forms of ing heading. The current Subject Headings Manual (2008)
multiple-word main headings (phrase headings) from a total specifies the three free-floating components being used, e.g.,
of 231,488 unsubdivided LC subject headings. The phrase “Metropolitan Area,” “Region,” “Suburban Area.” Examples
structure of LC subject headings displays several patterns: of free-floating headings include: “New York Metropoli-
adjectival, conjunctive, prepositional, inverted, and free- tan Area,” “Dallas Region (Tex.),” and “Atlanta Suburban
floating (Chan, 2008, pp. 218–219). Table 3 shows the results Area (Ga.)” showing different types of free-floating compo-
of an analysis of LCSH phrase patterns. nents, respectively. Because of the complexity of the contexts,

682 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
DOI: 10.1002/asi
TABLE 4. Analysis of the local relational structures.
Local relational Local relational
structure with structure with
unsubdivided subdivided
top main heading top main heading
No. of LRSs 231,488 110,257
No. of UFs (no. per LRS) 284,748 (1.23) 27,674 (0.25)
No. of BTs (no. per LRS) 230,806 (1.0) 16,716 (0.15)
No. of NTs (no. per LRS) 155,422 (0.67) 92,100 (0.84)
No. of RTs (no. per LRS) 19,978 (0.09) 1,704 (0.02)
we counted headings containing any of the current free-
floating components. We found only 477 free-floating head-
ings, a relatively small portion compared to any other form
of phrase headings. The Manual also notes that several free-
floating phrase headings have been discontinued, such as
[personal name] in fiction, drama, poetry, etc. and [name
heading (except personal names)] in literature in August
1993 and [name heading (except personal names)] in art in
January 1997. As the subject authority records, which were
downloaded from the LC site for this study, contain head-
ings created since 1985, we also counted all the headings
encompassing the earlier types of free-floating components.
Note that the frequencies of prepositional phrase headings
were counted to be 477 (0.1%) only for the currently used
three free-floating components and to be 6,313 (1.8%) for all
free-floating components including the ones used in the past.
In LCSH, a qualifier may be added to a heading in two situ-
ations (Chan, 2008, p. 220): to resolve the problem of multiple
meanings of a heading and to provide context for ambiguous
or technical terms. In both cases, the qualifier is enclosed in
parentheses. All headings including terms enclosed in paren-
theses were counted. Table 4 shows that 74,481 (21.8%)
headings contain qualifiers. We also tried to count the use
of qualifiers for the two situations. One way to distinguish
the two situations is to see if the term preceding the qualifier
is also an individual subject heading, e.g., to see if “Mercury”
itself is a standalone heading when the subject heading “Mer-
cury (automobile)” is considered. If the answer is yes, then
it reflects the first situation. Otherwise, it reflects the second
situation. Out of a total of 74,481 cases, only 1,066 cases fell
in the first situation and 73,415 cases belonged to the second
situation.
The accurate count of subject headings for each of the
categories shown in Table 3 often requires a semantic inter-
pretation of subject headings. However, the automated count-
ing methods in use in this study have a limited capability
for perfect counting. Consequently, the resultant numbers
and percentages reported in Table 3 should be taken as
approximate.
Markey and Vizine-Goetz’s OCLC project also investi-
gated some of the same categories used in our syntactical
analysis. In the OCLC project, headings for each category
were counted only by specific MARC tags, with a total num-
ber of 128,367 headings in tag 150 and 19,218 in tag 151.
The OCLC project reported that headings in the category of
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
“Noun/Adjectival” accounted for 65.48% and 48.71% of all
subject headings in tags 150 and 151, respectively; 11.59% in
tag 150 and 46.93% in tag 151 are for the category of “Qual-
ified”; 10.86% in tag 150 and 3.53% in tag 151 belong in the
category of “Inverted”; 5.83% in tag 150 and 0.53% in tag
151 in the “Prepositional Phrase” category; and 4.15% in
tag 150 and 0.27% in tag 151 are in the “Conjunctive Phrase”
category. When the percentages in both tags are combined,
our resultant percentages and those from the OCLC project
appear quite similar. Two key findings are: (a) the percentages
of headings for the categories calculated from two studies two
decades apart are comparable; and (b) the categories associ-
ated with the three largest percentages of subject headings
are “Qualifier,” “Inverted Phrase Headings,” and “Adjectival
Phrase Headings,” which together total almost 50%.
Structural Analysis of LC Subject Headings
LRSs of LCSH. In this study, a total of 341,745 LRSs were
constructed from LCSH authority records used. An LRS was
created for each specific established heading. The LRSs were
divided into two separate groups: LRSs with unsubdivided
top main headings (67.74%) and LRSs with subdivided top
main headings (32.26%). As recorded on the second row of
Table 4, there are a total of 231,488 LRSs of which top main
headings (i.e., the first heading in each LRS) do not carry
a subdivision. By contrast, the number of LRSs with sub-
divided top main headings is less than half of the number
of those with unsubdivided top main headings. In the LRSs
with unsubdivided top headings, the average numbers of UFs,
BTs, NTs, and RTs per LRS are 1.23, 1.0, 0.67 and 0.09,
respectively. In the subdivided LRSs, those of UFs, BTs, NTs,
and RTs per LRS are 0.25, 0.15, 0.84, and 0.12, respectively.
The frequency distributions of UFs, BTs, NTs, or RTs
within LRSs are plotted in Figures 2 through 5. In these
figures, the x-axis represents the number of UFs, BTs,
NTs, or RTs per LRS, and the y-axis represents the frequency
of LRSs. Each point in the plots represents the frequency of
LRSs for the corresponding number of UFs, BTs, NTs, or
RTs appearing in the x-axis.
FIG. 2. Frequency distribution of UFs in Local Relational Structures.
683
DOI: 10.1002/asi

FIG. 3. Frequency distribution of BTs in Local Relational Structures.
FIG. 4. Frequency distribution of NTs in Local Relational Structures.
FIG. 5. Frequency distribution of RTs in Local Relational Structures.
In each of the unsubdivided and subdivided cases as listed
in Table 4, the range of the average number is not wide:
1.14 for the unsubdivided case that is calculated by 1.23
minus 0.09, and 0.82 for the subdivided case that is cal-
culated by 0.84 minus 0.02. However, as demonstrated in
Figures 2 through 5, the distributed range of UFs, BTs, NTs,
and RTs greatly varies in each case. The ranges of each term
684 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
DOI: 10.1002/asi
FIG. 6. Frequency distribution of GHS trees in terms of tree size.
in any of the unsubdivided and subdivided cases are as fol-
lows: between 0 and 10 for BTs, between 0 and 17 for RTs,
between 0 and 68 for UFs, and between 0 and 1,025 for NTs.
A comparison of the plots in the figures demonstrates that
the two frequency distributions from two different LRS sets in
any UFs, BTs, NTs, or RTs case share a similar pattern. Fur-
thermore, a common characteristic across all four frequency
distributions of UFs, BTs, NTs, and RTs in each LRS set is
that the number of UFs, BTs, NTs, or RTs per LRS tends to be
inversely proportional to the number of LRSs. In other words,
with more UFs, BTs, NTs, or RTs per LRS, the frequency of
corresponding LRSs is inclined to decrease.
Some key findings here can be summarized: (a) our
study reported statistical data related to different types of
terms within LRSs—total frequency, frequency per LRS,
and frequency distribution; and (b) our study discovered the
similarity and variation across different types of terms in
distribution pattern and related frequencies.
GHS of LCSH. A total of 155,905 GHS trees were identified
and constructed from the LC subject authority records used in
this study. Figure 6 demonstrates the frequency distribution
of the GHS trees in terms of their size, i.e., the number of
subject headings per GHS tree. A dominant pattern of the
frequency distribution shown in the figure is that fewer GHS
trees tend to have more subject headings, i.e., there is an
inverse relationship between the frequency of GHS trees and
their size in general. Another characteristic is a long tail of
the distribution: the frequency of any GHS tree whose size is
at least 114 is equal to or under five.
The two extreme points of the plot are as follows: the point
at the upper-left corner represents 131,479 GHS trees, each
of which comprises only one subject heading, and the point at
the lower-right corner indicates that the corresponding GHS
tree has 1,455,026 subject headings. The largest tree is asso-
ciated with “Science,” i.e., the top subject heading of the GHS
tree is “Science.” The ordered list of the largest trees is as fol-
lows: 1,455,026 (“Science”), 769,526 (“Auxiliary sciences
of history”), 367,964 (“Culture”), 292,639 (“Religion”),
145,050 (“Life”), 103,495 (“Rehabilitation”).

FIG. 7. Frequency distribution of two groups of GHS trees in terms of tree
size.
The GHS trees can be divided into two different groups, G1
(a group of trees with non-subdivided top subject headings)
and G2 (a group with subdivided top subject headings). Of
a total number of 155,905 GHS trees, 59,892 trees (38.4%)
belong to G1 and 96,013 trees (61.6%) belong to G2. The
frequency distributions of the GHS trees for both groups
are separately plotted in Figure 7 for comparison. The two
plots are similar in shape but differ in that G1 has a much
longer tail and lower frequency over a broader range of dis-
tinct tree sizes in general. Some of the top largest trees in G1
are the same as those for all GHS trees. The ordered list of
the largest trees in G2 is as follows: 54,068 (“Mathematics–
Philosophy”), 21,029 (“Research–Equipment and supplies”),
6,524 (“Family–Study and teaching”), 6,261 (“Matter–
Constitution”), 2,152 (“Home economics–Equipment and
supplies”).
In summary, the total of 341,745 established headings
yields 155,905 GHS trees (45.62% of the total headings)
with an average of 2.19 headings per GHS tree. The
OCLC research reported that 39.74% of 128,367 topical
subject headings (MARC tag 150) and 56.67% of 19,218
established headings for geographical names (MARC tag
151) are orphan headings—headings that have no broader
terms. By definition, then, the number of orphan headings
must be equal to the number of GHS trees. By combining the
numbers from tag 150 and 151, the orphan headings account
for 41.94% (61,903) of the combined number of headings
from tag 150 and 151 (147,585).
Discussion
The Potential Use of LCSH for Subject Access to Digital
Networked Resources
Term coverage in LCSH. The subject authority file used in
this study contains 341,745 main headings, which include
both subdivided and unsubdivided ones. LCSH is known as
the most comprehensive, controlled vocabulary in English
(O’Neill & Chan, 2003). However, there are only 29,293
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
(equivalent to less than 10% of the total) single-word, unsub-
divided main headings (see Table 1), which is much less
than the number of words in a reasonably sized English
dictionary. In a study comparing LCSH and social tags,
Yi and Chan (2009) reported that only two thirds of the
social tags examined in the study were also found in LCSH.
Heckner et al. (2007) compared bibliographic metadata
comprising title, abstract, author-assigned keyword, and full-
text against social tags assigned to the same bibliographic
items. They reported that only 54 percent of the social
tags matched with the bibliographic metadata that do not
include LC subject headings. What causes such mismatches
between social tags and LCSH? Yi and Chan identified three
barriers: technology-related social tags, inconsistent forms
and patterns of multiword social tags, and incompatible
forms of social tags such as abbreviations or acronyms. In
LCSH-based automated subject indexing, the development
of sophisticated algorithms for linking LC subject headings
to target vocabulary is crucial as current state-of-the-art auto-
mated algorithms rely primarily on simple word matching.
Therefore, for terms that are not in LCSH, a novel algorithm
or approach should be devised to link them to proper LC
subject headings.
Syntactic structure of LCSH. Understanding the precise
syntactics of subject headings is a necessity in automated
assignment or selection of proper subject headings. In spite
of recent technological advances in artificial intelligence, the
discovery of a resource’s primary subject expressed in natural
language remains a challenging task. This study analyzed the
syntactic characteristics of LCSH and classified them in sev-
eral forms, as shown in Tables 2 and 3. Moreover, more than
90% of LC subject headings contain various phrase forms
to represent complex subjects, through subdivisions, quali-
fiers, free-floating forms, etc. Identifying specific syntactic
patterns of LCSH will significantly improve the process of
identifying the semantics of LC subject headings.
In addition, we encourage those seeking to apply LCSH
to digital resources to pay more attention to the synonym and
homograph issues. Synonym control is implemented within
LCSH. Synonyms of an LC subject heading are explicitly
listed through the equivalence relationship using USE and
UF. Homograph control is also practiced in LCSH through a
specific syntactic form, the qualifier. However, as qualifiers
are not used only for homograph control in LCSH, a special
caution must be paid to the identification of qualifiers for
homograph control for the accurate semantics. Furthermore,
an attempt to understand synonyms and homographs in LCSH
in the context of its LRS and GHS is particularly encouraging
for better extraction of the accurate semantics of LCSH.
Hierarchical structure in LCSH. LCSH was originally a
subject heading list that possessed explicit representation
of the relationships between concepts, including hierarchical
relationships. However, the hierarchical structures embed-
ded in LCSH are not as rigid as in typical thesauri, because
LCSH has been built from the bottom up, without the design
685
DOI: 10.1002/asi
and guidance of an overall hierarchical structure. The struc-
tural characteristics of the GHS trees demonstrated this point.
As illustrated in Figure 6, some GHS trees are extremely
large, and some are minimal with only one subject head-
ing. Some single-heading GHSs referring to the same subject
may be combined into a new tree or may be integrated into
existing GHS trees. Gigantic trees can be problematic when
their hierarchical structure is too complex to understand and
manage or when the hierarchical relationship between two
terms shown at a considerable distance within a tree is too
weak to be useful. Such quirky structures may occur from the
fact that when new headings were added, their hierarchical
positions do not appear to be taken into consideration in the
context of the GHSs of LCSH. As an independent tree ideally
represents a mutually exclusive single concept, trees with too
many nodes (implying overly broad concept) or too few nodes
(implying overly specific concept) are less useful for provid-
ing semantic information. For example, each of the following
LC subject headings is a single-node tree, respectively: “Folk
literature, Abazin,” “Folk literature, Bom,” “Folk literature,
Bunak,” “Folk, literature, Efik,” etc. However, splitting some
of the gigantic trees, those comprising a few thousand nodes
(headings), into several trees or combining very small size of
trees, those comprising only one single node, into larger size
of trees, based on semantics, appears to be quite challenging.
Given the current situation, a short-term method might be
to have terms in one or a few hierarchical levels placed into
an independent single hierarchical block, preserving strong
hierarchical relationship but abandoning weak ones.
Conclusion
With the proliferation of digital resources especially user-
created and shared resources, LCSH must confront the
demand of systematic organization and access to the massive
amount of the online resources. In response to the demand,
this study intends to examine the syntactic and hierarchical
structures of LCSH for the purpose of mining semanti-
cally contextual information of subject headings from the
structures embedded in LCSH.
This study is similar to an earlier work by Markey and
Vizine-Goetz (1988), but different in the approach to the
analysis and the intended goal. Markey and Vizine-Goetz’s
work focused on the analysis of LCSH itself in structural
aspects, such as MARC tags, subfields, etc., to represent
their statistical distribution. In contrast, the primary atten-
tion of the current study is to examine the syntactic and
hierarchical structures of LCSH to explore the feasibility of
mining the semantic and contextual information of LC sub-
ject headings and for its potential use in the construction of
LCSH-based access to digital resources. The two studies con-
ducted at the interval of a little over two decades produced
similar results in the syntactic analysis of LCSH regarding
the distribution of headings into various syntactic types. The
present study primarily relies on POS method and lexical
analysis. We experienced certain limitations in the analysis
686 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY—April 2010
DOI: 10.1002/asi
partly because of the obscure syntactic structure. Neverthe-
less, the value of this study lies in the structural analysis of
LCSH, unique and hitherto unexplored. In the analysis, the
hierarchical structures embedded in LCSH are analyzed in
perspectives of LRS and GHS. The empirical result identifies
a number of structural issues in LCSH, particularly in GHS.
Given the results of this study, we recommend the fol-
lowing provisional future directions for the development
of LCSH toward becoming a viable system for digital and
networked resources:
• Efforts should be made to render the semantics and syntax
of LCSH more consistent and predictable. As shown in the
result, the automatic analysis on syntactic structures in LCSH
failed to uncover the precise semantics intended in subject
headings in all cases because of their innate inconsistency.
Introducing predictable syntaxes into LCSH and using them
consistently will greatly assist in mining correct semantics of
subject headings, predictable in that intended semantics can
be retrievable based on the syntax. Thus, with the aid of more
predictable syntaxes, automatic tools of analyzing the LCSH
syntax can facilitate a better understanding of the semantics
of subject headings. Having predictable syntaxes is also ben-
eficial to the computer-based understanding of LCSH, which
will be essential in utilizing LCSH as a more useful tool in
the network environment.
• The structures of LCSH should be made more rigorously hier-
archical. LCSH contains rich semantic links among terms
through cross-references. However, its hierarchical relation-
ships are not always rigidly defined and implemented (Yi &
Chan, 2008) and, as a result, highly valuable semantic infor-
mation cannot be fully utilized. To make it worse, the
non-rigorous hierarchical relationships of a subject heading
will provide blurred or vague hierarchical context over the
heading and its related headings. A rigorous hierarchy in
LCSH will be beneficial to the mining of semantic knowledge
of LC headings and also facilitate the generation of domain-
specific or subject-specific ontologies.
• Intelligent utilization of a new type of external knowledge
source folksonomy may provide a novel approach for the inter-
operability of LCSH and other controlled vocabularies and
the integration of different information systems via LCSH.
Digital and traditional information resources are organized
using a variety of controlled vocabularies and/or classification
schemes. Achieving an enhanced interoperability among dif-
ferent systems, controlled vocabularies, metadata standards,
and stored resources is essential in utilizing these resources
to their best advantages.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank the anonymous reviewers of this article
for their valuable and insightful input and comments.
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