A Brave New (Faceted) World: Towards Full Implementation of Library of Congress Faceted Vocabularies

Abstract

The vocabularies described in this document are The Library of Congress Genre/Form Terms for Library and Archival Materials (LCGFT), the Library of Congress Medium of Performance Thesaurus (LCMPT), and the Library of Congress Demographic Group Terms (LCDGT). This paper summarizes the development of these vocabularies by the Library of Congress in collaboration with the ALCTS CaMMS Subject Analysis Committee and several specialized cataloging communities then suggests next steps aimed at full-scale current and retrospective implementation of faceted vocabulary terms in bibliographic and authority metadata. The discussion in the paper is in the context of MARC, but the concepts and the intellectual work are intended to be transferrable to emerging metadata formats such as BIBFRAME, to the extent that those formats are sufficiently granular and expressive.