You will notice a heading for
Subjects in the Library of Congress description of Oriental Cairo. The Library of CongressSubject Headings are categories in a system for grouping books with similar topics. Subject
headings are those words assigned to books that describe what the book is about. You can usethe Library of Congress Subject Headings to help choose appropriate words or subject
headings for Keyword searches in library catalogs. You can consult a print guide to Libraryof Congress subject headings or visit the
online
guide to subject headings . The headings are broken down like this:
Sports
(May Subd Geog)
UF Field sports
Pastimes
Recreations
BT Recreation
RT Athletics
Games
Outdoor life
SA subdivision Sports under military
services, e.g., United States. Army--Sports; and under ethnic groups
NT Aeronautical sports
Age and sports
Aquatic sports
Ball games
[etc...]
Here is a translation of the abbreviations:
University of Maryland Library. "Using Library of Congress Subject Headings."
December 10, 2004.
(External Link) You can see how each main heading is composed of many subheadings and related
terms. For
Oriental Cairo we find two subject headings: "Cairo (Egypt) --
Description and travel. " and"Egypt -- Description and travel."
Note the structure of the heading: first the region that the work focuses on is listed, followed
by its main subject, "description and travel." We might expect that the first heading,with its narrower focus on Cairo rather than the whole of Egypt, would provide fewer, more
focusedresults. The next step is to narrow this
list down to a manageable and productive collection of comparable works. As you will see,the ways we choose to narrow this list are themselves historical questions that might form
the basis of new research projects.
How to collect a productive bibliography from the library of congress subject headings
Begin with a question
Organizing a productive list of works to compare with
"Oriental Cairo" from the thousands of works out there requires that youcome up with the appropriate criteria for differentiating the works. This depends entirely
on your research needs. However, often the course of your research will change as youencounter new information about your topic. This is an excellent point in the project to
open your research up to several different possibilities and take the road that seems mostproductive to you in terms of what you find. The "right" questions are
only truly "right" in the sense that they yield productive results. Themost productive questions ever asked by historians probably started out as part of a list
of potentially productive directions.
How does "Oriental Cairo" compare with other works
published around the same time by other people from Great Britain?
How does it compare with works published around the same time from another
region, say Egypt or the United States?
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Source:
OpenStax, Conducting historical research: the case of "oriental cairo". OpenStax CNX. Oct 23, 2006 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col10291/1.4
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