Using OU's WebCat to investigate how LC subject headings are related to one another

First, locate a book on the topic that you already know about.  For example, lets say I am interested in finding more material on the diffusion of cultures, over time. in the world.  I know of one book on the topic, a book by Jared Diamond, written in the late 1990's, called Guns, Germs, and Steel.

So, I will carry out a title search in OU's Webcat, looking for that book:

In response to this title search, this record appears:

Notice that we now know the five subject headings applied by the Library of Congress to this book:

    social evolution
    civilization--history
    ethnology
    human beings--effect of environment on
    culture diffusion

Our task now is to decide which of these subject headings comes closer to what we think we are interested in, and to find two things about each of them:

1.  what books in the OU collection have that subject heading

2.  what other subject headings are related to that subject heading (broader in scope than it; narrower in scope than it; or just somehow related in scope to it, but not broader or narrower than it).

The first think is quite easy to do: just click on one of the five subject headings at the bottom of the Guns, Germs, and Steel book to have WebCat give you a list of the books in the OU collection that have that subject heading associated with them.

The second thing is quite easy to do as well, if you remember to go back to a blank search form and type in, instead of a title, the subject heading you are looking for, then clicking on the "subject" button (instead of the "title" button).  When you do that for the subject heading, say, "social evolution," it will look like this:

Now, however, look carefully at what WebCat returns to you when you click on a particular subject heading associated with a book.  For the first subject heading in the Diamond record, social evolution, we would get a lengthy list of several hundred books with that subject heading, but beginning at the top of the listing with a note that says "there are also cross references" to this subject heading.  That is what we are looking for.

So, if we click on "cross references" we are taken to this interesting listing:

Now you are able to find out how the subject heading you started with (social evolution) is related to other LC subject headings (civilization, evolution, cultural lab, and so forth) as either broader terms than social evolution, or narrower terms than social evolution.

Later, we will show you are comparable technique in working with LC subject headings using the huge "union" catalog of over 20,000 libraries, called WorldCat, which is found in the FirstSearch database services.  For now, you know how to find out about LC subject headings in OU's catalog, WebCat.