Creating Subject Headings

D. At FSN today I first checked-in with Kelly and we had a brief discussion on what the next steps in the project would be. She said that she and Sandra would decide on a library name by next week so that we can set up our library's account in LibraryThing. I told her about my visit to the Levine Children’s Hospital's Family Resource Center and shared with her my idea about using general subject areas as shelf labels. Kelly agreed that it was a good idea. I spent the rest of the time creating a list of key words that I want to use to tag the resources in the collection. LibraryThing will only let you search the title, author, ISBN, and tags. Therefore the tags in the catalog must function as our subject headings. I want to try to standardize my tags so that they will be the topics that FSN, the CDSA, and their families are most likely to use. So today I looked over the list of resources that the FSN has and I went to the closet where the CDSA stores their books and tried to pull out the topics and key words that I would most likely be using. I then emailed the list to my supervisors to review.
E. Even though I feel like in some ways I am "recreating the wheel" because LC already has subject headings I feel that this list I made today and standardizing these terms are going to really help make this collection easily searchable. It was a lot of fun to start going through some of these resources. To be completely honest it went slower then I could have because I started reading some of these books. Some of their resources are children's fiction books about kids with disabilities or handicaps. They were really interesting. My favorites were the one about the ADHD turtle and the epileptic duck. It was cute. By the end of the day I felt very accomplished. I really hope that my supervisors get on board with this key word concept though. I have explained to them a couple of times why it is important, but I am not sure they exactly understand why. I feel that they won't get it until they start searching and can't find something because it isn't labeled under that term.

I was also stumped by a couple of different terms that I hope my supervisors will help me out with. There were a lot of books talking about children with disabilities and explaining that concept to other children. What would you label those? "Diversity" "Handicapped Children" Also one book was titled mental retardation. Is that an ok term to use anymore? I hope my supervisors will help out on those questions.

AL. I learned that there are a ton of resources available to parents who have children with special needs or disorders. I wonder how many parents know about them. But there are so many resources available. I also learned how hard it is sometimes to describe why something is so important to others who don't understand the system that it works in. (It was difficult to emphasize why this key words thing is so important).

I hope that next week I will get to start cataloging!